My New Year’s resolution was “to consume the California coast in a single gulp,” said Christopher Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. Starting off in my Toyota Corolla at the state’s southernmost point in the Tia Juana River Valley, I’d drive up the coastal roads until I reached Oregon. Of course, “unless you can spend a month on a trip like this, you have to leave out places.” My brief itinerary skipped stops in Orange County entirely, and I spent only minutes in San Francisco. But that meant I had the chance to discover a California I’d never known. “When you travel off-season, you find more bare beaches, thinner traffic,” and considerably cheaper hotels. Best of all, the “rocks, sand, surf,” and wildlife know nothing about economic instability or financial crises. “That makes them excellent companions.”
“Mile Zero” was swampy Border Field State Park, in San Diego County. I drove no more than 15 miles before I reached, of all things, an outdoor ice-skating rink near the rocky beach in Coronado. “Ridiculous, meet sublime.” The first morning found me at Mile 177, where I took a brief detour by bicycle along the Santa Monica Bay Trail. By the next morning I had made it to Mile 411, where I climbed Black Hill in Morro Bay State Park to watch the sun rise. I stopped to walk the waterfall trail at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park in Big Sur (Mile 505), where “the convergence of tumbled rocks, surging sea, and rampaging winds” created a spectacle I could barely tear myself away from.
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