If you’ve been following along, you’ll know so far this trip has been 100% things I said I wouldn’t do.
Not as in:
I would NEVER do that 😱
But as in:
Yeah Big Sur would be cool, but I’m not planning on going to California
^That’s a real conversation I had with Josh, way back in January when I first was thinking about going to Texas. It’s funny how fast things change when you let your mind be open to changing.
My friend Catalina is a flight attendant which allows her to catch domestic flights the same way us plebs might call an Uber. When I met up with her at Snowta (at the start of my road trip) she mentioned how this perk would make it easy to road trip with me for a bit. Continuing the theme of “Solo Trip with Friends”, and taking advantage of her week off work, we made plans to meet up and do a road trip through Big Sur.
A road trip within a road trip.
The keen reader may notice that this route starts from L.A., not Carlsbad (where I was staying). Flying into LAX made the most sense for Catalina, but it was 2 hours from Max’s. Lucky for me, my friend Paul lives in L.A. — and only 15 minutes from the airport! He was in town and happy to host me. Getting there the night before Catalina’s arrival, I was excited for the chance to catch up with Paul since he moved to California last year.
This sets the scene for Monday, February 17th 2025, LAX at high noon (🤠), as Catalina gets into my car and we set off for untold adventures! …In a very literal sense. The entirety of the plan thus far was: ‘drive up SR-1 through Big Sur’ 👍. That’s not much of a plan if you consider we have 5 days to do it (a roughly 8 hour drive).
While doing it live has been working out fantastic so far, we at least needed to know where we were sleeping that night. We headed back to base camp, a.k.a. Paul’s house, to fill in the blanks.
Only recently did I begin to really understand how much “startup grind culture” had been internalized over my time at Vera. Not only was it coloring my perception of reality, but (more concerningly) my reaction to reality. While at Max’s, I noticed how things like doing the dishes, making time to workout, folding my laundry, ordinary tasks, had become tasks that I had to do RIGHT NOW — blocking progress on most creative or luxuriative endeavors. Everything was just a blocker for the next thing. I had quit my job, driven to California, and living rent free at Max’s — but I STILL felt just as busy.
WTF mate?
While that distortion is receding with time and awareness, I’ve wondered if there is some baseline, fast-paced nature ingrained much deeper within me. In California I found that while everyone else in line at the store appears to be best friends with the cashier — I was only there to do a transaction.
Perhaps this is a cultural artifact from the Mid-Atlantic. I pondered how my East Coast friends found other East Cost friends while out west. How “California work ethic” is a thing (really lack there of). How fucking big this country is and how many people are in it. How small the window is that we get into every locality. How naive it is to make any generality about a state or geographical area. 😉
From what I’ve seen, people here are overwhelmingly more laid back than where I’m from. Whether that’s correct or not — I’m not one to say. But I think I’m finally starting to understand, or at least have my own reasons, as to why. It’s so damn beautiful out here, there is so much to soak in! Why rush?
What started out as a walk with Catalina to grab a quick bite, turned into a couple hour adventure. Our constant picture taking not doing us any favors. By the time we made it back to Paul’s house, only a few hours of daylight remained— and we still hadn’t figured out where we were going. 😅
It turns out that several portions of the Pacific Coast Highway are closed due to landslides. This immediately poked a hole in our “just drive up the coast” plan. As Catalina and I pinched and twisted around Google Maps, Paul tossed out that he liked this town called Ojai. So we looked it up.
✅ 1.5 hours from L.A.
✅ Avoids the closed section of SR-1 near L.A.
✅ Free camping: adjacent to Los Padres National Forest
Random yet reasonable, and organically teased out of the universe — the decision was practically made for us. We thanked Paul, said bye to Wicket, and hit the road.
Our goal was to utilize dispersed camping within the Los Padres National Forest, which neighbored Ojai. The challenge was that you couldn’t camp off of the main road through it. Arriving in the dark, I wasn’t optimistic we’d get anything better than feigning innocence on the side of 33. We lucked out and found a campground that was open — plus had first come, first serve camping. Cash only. We had no cash, but it seemed like no one was there, and it was late, so we just parked at the designated site and set up camp.
The next day we awoke to a really beautiful campground! Encountering the host, he asked about payment, and we said we hadn’t a chance to drop it in the box yet 😅 We eventually got cash, went to the fee box, and saw it was $72 for 2 nights! For a campground that only had primitive toilets and no running water, in the off-season (we were one of 3 groups there), that seemed steep. Look, maybe not morally correct, but I’ll tell it how it is: I put $60 in the box and wrote 1.75 nights. I mean we got there well after dark the first night, plus I didn’t have change from $80 😶
The next day we went on a hike to a waterfall, which ended up having a bonus second portion going even higher. Thankfully someone had tied a couple ropes, because the broken rock made it like walking the wrong way up an escalator! We were sliding all over the place.
Zack (Zach?) the camp host seemed super chill and we didn’t expect him to even check the fee box before we left. Turns out he did, and came by our campsite the next morning to inquire about our debt. Thankfully Catalina was there to more charismatically handle the situation than I could have: paying the remainder on her card, and somehow walking away with a free fire starter log. Going on our way, we packed up camp and hit the road.
Our next destination: Oceano Dunes Vehicular Recreation Area (camping on the beach? with your car?? yes please). On the way there, we stopped by a hot springs which was awesome. It was the hottest one I’ve been to before — the top pool apparently 115°F. I believe it, I couldn’t get more than a toe in, and the second to top was only tolerable for minutes at a time. I watched other people come and wince as they tried to relax.
Somewhere along the way after leaving the springs, we stopped the car and got out to take pictures in the middle of the road. Catalina has a great mind for taking fun pictures! I thought it was funny how different we went about it. Even after 2 weeks with Eli in Tahoe, I’m still working on warming up to fun poses.
Camping on the beach is always a treat. It’s fun to drive on the sand, and a West Coast beach has the sunset. Catalina is an adept in the art of using her smartwatch to trigger selfies. We had fun taking pictures with the sun behind us, just silhouettes in front of the drastic display of colors all around us. Check the album for all of them, there’s quite a few.
Later that night, we were by the water and noticed there was bioluminescent algae (or something idk) in the sand! If you ran your fingers through it, like scraping or raking it, you’d see what looked like small firefly flashes in the sand. Almost like someone was dripping glow stick liquid on the sand. Super unexpected and one of my favorite parts of this trip so far!
A blissful evening camping turned to into a rude awakening from our new neighbors — the sound of 10 ATV’s running just feet from our tent, sitting there idling at 7am. Being the only folks there without an RV and a squad of off road vehicles, we took it as a sign and hit the road.
Our final stretch of the trip was a seemingly endless display of coastal paradise, the road mirroring the twisting coastline. We had about 5 hours to Santa Cruz, where we were meeting Cadence for a night at a hostel.
We made a pit stop and happened to see an elephant seal! (the species was informed via eavesdropping on an elementary school field trip). Catalina got a perfect video of it waving. The only proof it was alive for the 30 minutes we were there. Seeing it wave, the field trip students collectively freaked out, as did we. “It’s alive!!”
We went as far as we could up the coast before facing road closures. The ocean growing further away as we climbed higher, it eventually disappeared as we entered the mountains of Los Padres National Forest once again, right back to where we started. 💫
A few hours later, we arrived in Santa Cruz, extremely hyped on the idea of a shower. Stay tuned for a separate post on Santa Cruz.
Unsurprisingly, Catalina was a great co-pilot and a good sport in dealing with my level of cleanliness on the road — which some may find…questionable haha (just wiping out a bowl is clean…right?)
For being a ton of driving due to stops and detours, we had a lot of fun with stupid jokes along the way. Dad jokes in “Los Padres” National Forest was the theme of the ride. Our favorite dad joke was saying “I see” every time we saw an Icy sign (there were at least 50 of them I swear). It was never icy, not even once.
From leaving Paul’s house in L.A. to arriving in Santa Cruz, this definitely was one of the more memorable stretches of my trip so far!
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