California — Down the Coast to Big Sur

Next night we were back on the Pacific Ocean in Bodega Bay, staying in Doran Beach State Park (Recommended), located right on the bay, complete with flashing lighthouse and hooting fog horn. Menominee loved the sandy campsite — rolling in sand, digging in it, peeing in it — and we took long walks exploring the dunes.

Then it was southward on Highway 1 to Point Reyes National Seashore. Although it's close to San Francisco, the park is surprisingly rural and rustic. The road, I swear, hasn't seen new asphalt since the Truman administration, but drive over the hills to the west side and the Pacific Ocean lies spread before you, stretching into the mist at the horizon. A cold wind blew in off the ocean, pushing fog over the road and up the hills, so we didn't stay to sunbathe.

We spent two nights in a state park campground over on the sunny side of the the hills. The park is only about a mile from the San Andreas Fault, infamous for its ferocious earthquakes, but we felt nary a tremor.

Then it was time for the big push. We pumped lots of gas into Cruisemaster and headed over the hills and down the highway toward San Francisco. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, slithered through the western outskirts of San Fran, and rejoined the coast on Highway 1, which continues to hug the ocean down past Monterey and Santa Cruz.

South of that lies Big Sur, about 90 miles of desolate coastline reached by a very curvy two-lane road carved into a steep mountainside. If you dare take your eyes off the road, you can see spectacular views of the waves hitting the rocky shore hundreds of feet below. You also cross the historic Bixby Bridge, which was built of concrete in 1932 and — despite all the earthquakes since then — still safely carries traffic. (Compare that with a certain steel bridge built in the 1960s which recently fell into the Mississippi.)

The big tourist attraction along the Big Sur coast is the Hearst Castle at San Simeon (Recommended), built by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (the Rupert Murdoch of the U.S.). He used his enormous wealth to buy European antiquities — from trapestries and paintings to whole fire places — ship them to San Simeon, and build a castle around them. Julia Morgan was the architect, civil engineer, interior decorator, and landscape designer who turned Hearst's dreams into reality. The project evolved over decades, as Hearst was always coming up with new ideas. His wife lived on the East Coast; he and his mistress, beautiful starlet Marian Davies, hosted lavish parties for Hollywood celebrities at the castle.

From this opulent cathedral to wealth we retired in our RV to a state park campground ($18 for the night).