I took today off. I had breakfast, and I made an appointment for a neck and shoulder massage at my hotel (known as the tech massage). No plans for site seeing today. I saw quite a bit of LA yesterday, it was great.
So it’s time to start heading east, back toward home. Am I ready? With trepidation. I’m ready to be home. I’m not ready for what waits for me there.
(Side note: I should have taken more time to go down the Pacific coast. A lot of 101 is very curvy and challenging to navigate for hours at a time. I’m sure I also missed some beautiful sites. However, my rush to get to LA was to see the Redskins play the Rams in the LA Memorial Coliseum, and the Redskins won, so it was worth it!)
What I learned from the Pacific coast –
- People from Washington state are very very friendly.
- Oregon drivers are aggressive. More aggressive than LA drivers. On three different occasions I had drivers an inch off my bumper when I was slowing down to the posted speed limit to take curves, while the ocean stretched out below me on the right side of the road).
- LA Drivers drive fast, but they still leave room around your car.
- 101, and the Pacific coast is just beautiful. Two of my campsites were right next to the ocean, and I’m convinced those nights were the best sleep I got the whole trip.
- Don’t ever pull into a campsite after dark. It is really a pain to try to find your reserved site.
- Driving over the Bay Bridge out of San Francisco is definitely worse than driving over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco.
- Mercy Hot Springs is remote and might be a little too close to a ghost town with bad juju. Because I definitely got the heebeejeebees staying there. It was still lovely to soak in hot springs under the stars.
- LA is big. Big big big BIG.
Can I make this sort of thing my life? Traveling the country, writing about the adventures I have? Maybe. Am I ready to start making decisions about what’s next? No. But I’ve started thinking about it.
In the short term, what’s next for this trip is to travel through much of the route 66 area, with stops at the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and Roswell, NM.
Until we meet again…