What they don't tell you about sightseeing on the Pacific Coast Highway
California likes to brag about the scenery along Highway 1 (also known in some sections as the Pacific Coast Highway and in other sections as the Highway to Hell…AC/DC probably drove it in a tour bus), but as is so often the case, I’m here to give you the other side of the story.
And away we go…
If you’ve ever considered driving the entire length of Highway 1 – the two-lane road that hangs on to the coast of California by some very short fingernails – actually driving just a few miles of it might convince you it’s a bad idea.
Unless…you’re the kind of masochist who would enjoy a 656-mile long roller coaster ride that lasts 17 hours and I’m not.
I’ve ridden roller coasters exactly twice in my life; once as a kid only to find out I really didn’t like roller coasters and the second time as a father so my overly-enthusiastic and completely misguided son could find out he didn’t like them either. (Greater love hath no man and/or father who didn’t want to look like a chicken to his soon-to-be nauseous son.)
If I really want to feel sick and dizzy I’d rather drink two Negro Modelos, three shots of Jose Cuervo Gold, then visit Taco Bell, slam down a Blue Raspberry Lemonade Freeze, two Black Bean Quesaritos, three Black Bean Loaded Taco Fries Burritos (none of which I made up although it sounds like I did) and then ask a complete stranger to kick me in the nuts.
The results would be remarkably similar to riding a roller coaster and I’d save a trip to Disney World.
People drive the Pacific Coast Highway for the scenery, but if you’re behind the wheel you’re not going to be checking out the view because long stretches of the road have no guardrail and in some spots it’s about a billion-and-half foot drop to the ocean, but come to think of it you probably don’t have to worry about drowning in the Pacific Ocean because you’re much more likely to explode into a giant ball of flame on the way down.
If you’re the one driving, all things considered, maybe you want to focus on the road.
The passengers riding in your vehicle might get some great views as long as they trust you to not take your eyes off the road when they get overly-excited and say:
“I think I saw a whale!”
And on this Northern California trip I saw a lot of whales, a lucky streak that rivaled Jacques Cousteau and continued right up until one of my friends looked where I was pointing and said:
“Lee, that’s a rock.”
Which I interpreted as immature jealousy and envy caused by my good whale-spotting luck or just possibly an indication that maybe I need to start wearing my glasses again because it now seems likely that if we’d been hunting Moby Dick while depending on my eyesight and whale expertise, there’s a 70-30 chance we would have harpooned a milkman.
This picture is the River’s End Restaurant & Inn (located at the point the Russian River meets the Pacific) with a lot of whales in the background:
And this is a really, really big whale sneaking up behind me:
Little-known fact: whales are really sneaky and often disguise themselves as rocks and it’s a little-known fact because I just made it up so I could use your help spreading this information and if you’ve been sharing articles about how masks don’t work and COVID vaccines make horns grow out your forehead your accuracy standard is pretty low so go ahead and share the Whales-Disguised-As-Rocks rumor.
This worst that could happen is some Trump supporters might harpoon a boulder.
Long-drop story alert
All this long-way-to-fall talk reminds me of a story about a construction worker who took a very long fall and upon impact broke just about every bone in his body yet somehow survived and when they got to him, here’s the first thing he said:
“I bit my tongue.”
A statement that would seem to indicate biting your tongue hurts worse than breaking every bone in your body and in my experience that tongue-biting pain is only surpassed by stubbing your toe and if CIA interrogators could figure out how to make you stub your toe and bite your tongue simultaneously they could put away the buckets and stop water boarding people.
Considering their past history, I feel confident the CIA is working on it.
Anyway…
Lots of houses along Highway 1 are perched out over the Pacific Ocean supported by stilts and here’s what I have to say about that.
This is Highway 1:
And this is the San Andreas Fault:
You’d think just maybe the people who build highways would have noticed this and before they build a freeway on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens maybe someone should give me a call.
So you build your kajillion dollar home on the edge of a cliff and support it with steroidal toothpicks and then expect the coastline to stay the same forever even though coastlines change all the time due to erosion or tsunamis or Hollywood Action Movies and then lose your damn mind (not to mention your house) when something that’s been happening since the Dawn of Time continues to happen.
And here’s what happens when a coastline decides it’s time for a change:
But the highway builders and stilt-house people aren’t alone.
We build houses next to rivers and are then stunned when the river changes course or decides to flood; river hijinks that have been going on since they invented rivers.
We build houses in forests and since we want to watch Netflix in those houses in the forests we string power lines through trees and are then stunned when a 12,000 volt line and a fallen tree don’t mix.
If you haven’t already reached this conclusion, allow me to help: given the right incentive, humans can be morons.
And driving the Pacific Coast Highway for the scenery isn’t all that smart especially if you’re the one doing the driving because you might go off a cliff and land on a whale.
They’re everywhere.