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Land’s end

Even though my trip south originally brought me across the Bay, it seemed like San Francisco was the logical starting point for my long trek home along the coast.

So after a quick sketch (while humming that Journey song that popped into my head for the umpteenth time), I crossed the bridge and headed north.

It wasn’t long before I’d left civilization almost completely behind. My chosen route was the (in)famous Highway One, which winds a precarious path along the shore, with breathtaking views and treacherous challenges at every hairpin turn. In other words, it was perfect in nearly every way. Despite the environmental guilt of it all, I confess that I love driving—and hugging the curves of 300 miles of switchbacks in a stick-shift Subaru? Pure, unadulterated bliss. And while I missed the company of the Tailor, or any of my other traditional travel buddies, it was nice to be able to stop and take a picture every thirty seconds, without the risk of annoying anyone!

I knew that by traveling the Coast Highway on a weekday in February, I’d have the place pretty much to myself. But I was completely unprepared for the solitude that awaited me at my first stop along the way: Point Reyes National Seashore.

Point Reyes is a long, jagged cape with an equally long history. Sir Francis Drake reportedly landed there in 1579, and people have inhabited it, farmed it, settled it, and even wrecked their ships upon it for many, many generations. Since the 1850s much of the land has been parceled out into dairy farms, which are still in operation today, thanks to the protection of the National Park Service.

What first struck me about the place is the near total absence of trees. The place reminded me more of the Scottish highlands than anything I’d seen in California—and in fact, one of the few small towns located on the peninsula is called Inverness.

And I’m sure that at the height of summer, the place is crawling with tourists—but that day I was completely alone. For miles and miles and miles, it was just me and the cows.

I hadn’t intended to travel the whole length of the cape; I wasn’t on a fixed timetable or anything, but by that point it was already late morning. But I saw a sign indicating a lighthouse ahead, so I kept going. There was no mile count on the sign, and I didn’t bother to fish out the map. It couldn’t be far, right? Well, the road wound on and on and on, with no sign of a lighthouse, and no indication of where this would end. But then, a full twenty miles on, the track came to an abrupt end. I got out of the car, faced back north, and nearly had to pick my jaw up off the ground.

The lighthouse was just a short hike from there:

I could see why people were forever dashing their boats upon the rocks.

And that wasn’t the only thing I could see. I was staring into the bright teal surf when something surfaced and caught my eye:

A gray whale! It’s funny—I’ve lived on one coast or another for over eleven years of my life, and I’d never seen a whale in person before. If that wasn’t worth the forty-mile detour, I don’t know what is.

After the whale-watching and a 2-minute watercolor, I made the long trek back to the highway.

The remaining stretch of Highway One was almost equally deserted. It made the miles melt away quickly, and gave me the feeling that I had the whole Pacific to myself.

Before long, the rolling hills and eucalyptus trees tapered off,

and the landscape gave way to cypress stands and evergreen forests.

The road ended just as the day did. As the sun went down the path turned eastward, away from the shore, and plunged into the thick darkness of coastal forest. By the time I pulled into a hotel for the night, it was pitch black, and Highway One had been replaced by the other Pacific Highway: US 101. I was in completely unfamiliar territory, and would be until I came all the way north to Astoria several days later, but despite the darkness and lack of bearings, I knew what lay ahead. And I was almost too excited to sleep, because I knew that in the morning, the sun would reveal exactly where I was: in the heart of redwood country.