Soaring over California

Isn’t that the name of the ride at Disney’s California Adventure? Anyway, that’s what I feel like I have been doing since eight o’clock this morning, soaring over California, when we took off from a Victorian village called Ferndale not far from the Avenue of the Giants and headed South on 101. Of course, we have been soaring in a car, but the feeling isn’t wildly different when you cover as much ground as we have in a day. I am typing this somewhere in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley as Sheryl drives.

This is some state or nation state or whatever it is. I hadn’t been deep in the redwood country since doing research for my novel The Lost Coast. All the clichés about awe and religious experience are true. The trees can make an atheist shiver. And then you come down into the wine country, hundreds of miles of some of the most beautiful vineyards on Earth. We stopped for lunch at the Healdsburg branch of the Oakville Grocery. (Sad to say the sandwiches were disappointing, but I’m sure the bottles I bought will be just fine.). And then around San Francisco and Oakland through Livermore of the laboratory and the wind farm on the 580.

Now we are Coalinga, land of cow stench. Los Angeles looms.