Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:43:31 -0700
Reply-To: Tom Sinclair <neeemo@YAHOO.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Tom Sinclair <neeemo@YAHOO.COM>
Subject: Re: NY Times article about traveling in a westy
In-Reply-To: <45f63316.4b2e590b.0853.68cb@mx.google.com>
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Chris Dixon has written a couple articles on Westies
for the Times.
Here is the text:
March 9, 2007
California Coasting
By CHRIS DIXON
UNDER a full moon, Jalama Beach was stunning. Bathed
in the pale lunar glow, the heaving black Pacific
washed onto a light, sandy beach. To the north, a
curve of coastline was backed by imposing mountains,
massive dark hulks in the dim light. Rolling
ranchland, dotted with oaks just visible against the
night sky, spread out to the east and south.
This was the California coast, where a night in a
hotel in the fabled beach towns between San Francisco
and San Diego might run hundreds of dollars, and a
week in even a modest beach house would cost $1,500 to
$4,000. But I had found oceanside accommodations for
$18.
At Jalama Beach County Park, operated by Santa Barbara
County, $18 bought a night in the park campground, the
only publicly accessible spot on this wild stretch of
coast for 40 miles. In summer, staying there — or at
any of the other public beach campgrounds in
California — would be almost impossible. Hordes of
vacationers snap up/ the campsites the moment
reservations for the weeks from Memorial Day and Labor
Day become available. Those who do get spots find
themselves packed in with other campers. But we — my
wife, Quinn, and I and our 18-month-old daughter, Lucy
— traveled at the end of January. For the most part,
we found it was possible simply to drive up to the
gate a few hours before sunset and rent a choice site.
Sure, this was winter camping, but we toured the
southernmost campgrounds and experienced sunny days
with highs in the 60s, 70s, even 80s, great for
wetsuit surfing, beachcombing and side trips into
beach towns like Malibu and Laguna Beach. At night,
when temperatures dropped into the 40s, we could
bundle up to walk on the moonlit sand or stay snug in
one of the most economical forms of camping
accommodation available — a reconditioned 1973
Volkswagen camper van.
We had rented our van from Bill Staggs, an Orange
County surfer whose company, Vintage Surfari Wagons,
owns a small fleet of these retro relics, fully
outfitted, roadworthy and refurbished. The price was
$89 a day, and driving this funky motor home seemed an
ideal way to meander along the Pacific Coast Highway.
We started between San Diego and Los Angeles and
worked north, finding a succession of well-equipped
campgrounds, all with hot showers, inviting fire pits
and separate sections for huge R.V.’s and small
campers or tents. Everywhere, the beaches were
beautiful and serene.
San Onofre
Nestled between the sprawling Camp Pendleton Marine
base and the charming surf-centered town of San
Clemente, the San Onofre State Beach park runs roughly
four miles from Cotton’s Point, the site of the
Western White House of President Richard M. Nixon,
southward through a series of famed surfing breaks
known as the Trestles before reaching the mile-long,
palm-lined, thatched-hut paradise at the San Onofre
Surfing Beach. Its wild strand is interrupted only by
the ominous domes of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating
Station before continuing south through a long stretch
of untamed but easily accessible beaches known as the
Trails.
We reached the surfing beach in midafternoon on a
Sunday. The crowd was sparse and the sky sunny. I
threw on my wetsuit and paddled out in 60-degree
water. I dropped into my first wave, and a dolphin
rocketed through the water alongside me. A couple of
hours later, Quinn and I were toasting the setting sun
with chardonnay.
The San Mateo campground, one of two at this park, is
tucked into an unspoiled, oak-lined river valley.
Though little more than a mile from the beach, and
separated from it by Interstate 5, it seems a world
away. On a peaceful Sunday night, the distant hum of
traffic was drowned out by guitar strumming from a
neighboring campsite and regular howls from a distant
pack of coyotes.
I crept out of the van before sunrise the next
morning, eager to surf in front of the former Nixon
estate. I shared the mile-and-a-half-long
chaparral-lined trail to the beach (it crosses under
the freeway along the banks of San Mateo Creek) with
scores of rabbits, an owl and a coyote. After an hour
of flawless waves, I hiked back, spotting a bobcat and
a covey of startled quail.
San Onofre is California’s fifth-most-popular state
park, but a proposed six-lane toll road would cross
near the campground. If it is approved, opponents say,
the landscape will be irrevocably altered. We were
glad to have seen it before that happens.
Leo Carrillo
About 100 miles up the Pacific Coast Highway from San
Onofre, Leo Carrillo State Park sits at the base of
the Santa Monica Mountains along the oak and
sycamore-shaded Arroyo Sequit, which is usually a dry
creek bed but can become a torrent after winter
storms. The arroyo meets the Pacific at a mile-long,
mountain-shadowed crescent of beach with an often
crowded surfing break and vast, anemone-filled tide
pools, whose denizens positively fascinated Lucy.
We were completely alone on the beach and nearly so in
the campground, which is hidden among trees at the
base of a long, verdant canyon.
We parked and set up near the streambed. After a
dinner cooked over the camper’s propane stove, we
settled in for sleep — the camper has a double bed
that folds out of the back seat and a bunk in the pop
top. Owls and coyotes serenaded us to sleep.
The next morning, we roamed the densely forested banks
of the arroyo. The trees were filled with bluebirds
and a shrieking flock of wild green parrots, which
were regarded with some disdain by a large red-tailed
hawk.
(The park, by the way, was named for a California
conservationist and actor, who is perhaps best known
for his role as Pancho in the 1950s TV series “The
Cisco Kid.”)
Carpinteria
The shore at Carpinteria State Beach has been called
the place where asphalt meets the sea — not because of
some modern roadway, but in honor of an eons-old tar
pit that nature has placed right in front of one of
the town’s better surf spots. Chumash Indians once
used the tar to seal their canoes. Close to the water,
Lucy dug in soft sand, picked daisies, chased scores
of gulls and gawked at a great blue heron stalking the
dunes.
In Carpinteria itself, a quirky but sophisticated
little beach town about 13 miles south of Santa
Barbara, we strolled along Linden Avenue, admiring the
quaint shops, Craftsman homes and century-old palm
trees all set against the 4,000-foot Santa Ynez
Mountains. At the Rincon Designs surf shop, Lucy tried
on about 10 pairs of toddler-size flip-flops.
At the campground, we found another couple, Libba and
Laurie Padgett, staying in a VW camper — a 1989
Westfalia with an odometer reading of 385,000
kilometers (239,228 miles). The Padgetts had used it
for a decade to make trips from their home in Powell
River, British Columbia, to the desert Southwest. In
1975, in an earlier VW microbus, they drove with their
four children across Mexico. “They were all blond, and
we got a lot of attention,” Mr. Padgett said. “There
was love everywhere we went.”
Of the campgrounds they’d visited, Mr. Padgett judged
Carpinteria to be perhaps his favorite. “It’s
beautiful here, and everything is so convenient to
town,” he said. “And this town hasn’t changed much
through the years, but the rest of California is so
different.”
Jalama Beach
The lonely, winding 14-mile road off the Pacific Coast
Highway leading to Jalama Beach County Park was spooky
but majestic for after-dark arrival. To the north of
this park is the mountainous Vandenburg Air Force
Base; to the south are the gates of the 25,000-acre
Bixby Ranch — a place of sweeping foothills, happy
cows and long surf breaks — which was recently sold to
an investment group for a reported $140 million.
The roar of the ocean boomed through the van’s open
top early the next morning. In the soft sand outside
were the pawprints of at least three raccoons that had
been sniffing around for a leftover. Daylight offered
a clearer picture of the rocky, windswept shore. This
tiny 22-acre park has to be one of the prettiest
campgrounds in all the West.
Out on the chilly beach, a bundled-up group of campers
oohed and aahed at the huge westerly swell. Nearby,
some high-school-age surfers from Los Angeles huddled
around a huge pan of sizzling bacon and prepared to do
some surfing. Charlie Piechowski, 17, said he had
followed the news of the ranch sale and hoped that it
would mean more public access to well-known,
difficult-to-reach breaks like Cojo and Government
Points.
Nancy Aardweg, the manager of the park’s tiny general
store, which also has a fine restaurant, said that
some local people were concerned that the sale of the
ranch might usher in a big development, changing the
nature of this wild place.
The restaurant’s walls double as a museum, with
shelves holding the history of Jalama in fossils,
photographs and words. There, the September 1923 Honda
Point Disaster, the Navy’s worst navigational
accident, is immortalized in pages from The Lompoc
Record: “The ships were going at such terrific speed
when they hit that they bounded on top of the low
reefs and tore great holes in their bottoms.”
(Twenty-three sailors died and seven nearly new
destroyers were lost in the dense fog near the Santa
Barbara Channel.)
The air was chilly, and I took a walk alone along the
beach toward the Tarantulas, an ominously named
reef-bottomed surf break two miles south. Along the
way, shells, driftwood, river stones and washed-up
kelp lay below questionably stable sandstone cliffs.
Throngs of tittering little shorebirds dug for food in
the sand.
Offshore, dolphins rode and dived, and I imagined a
shipwrecked sailor struggling ashore. I like to surf,
but I wanted no part of these enormous, frigid waves.
The grandeur of the scenery was enough.
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