Welcome back to 2021! As I promised in my last blog post all those many months ago, I spent the last few weeks of 2020 taking a little break from traveling. I went back to New Hampshire where I got some rest, spent time with family, visited friends, and enjoyed my holidays. After spending most of a year by myself it was so nice to be around people again. It was also nice to stop moving around for a little while, at least until I had to start moving once again.
I had to make my way to Texas in time for New Years Eve to be in my friends’ wedding in Austin, and then I spent a couple of weeks quarantining in the vast open desert of West Texas. I posted photos here on my website, but didn’t write a blog post about it specifically (even though I had prepared several jokes in my head about “getting back in the saddle”). I hiked and backpacked in the desert, brushed up against Mexico, and got a tiny taste of the funky, artsy flavor of West Texas.
I had originally planned to take off full steam ahead from Texas back into full time travel, but at the beginning of the year the covid situation nationally was pretty dire. Places were going back into lockdown, things weren’t open, and traveling around was less safe at that time than it had been at any other time on my trip. It happened that my friend in Santa Barbara had an open sublet in her apartment for a couple of months, and the timing worked out, so I headed back to SB a little over a year after moving away from it.
My time in Santa Barbara was spent mostly visiting my friends and doing all the “Santa Barbara things,” like drinking pink wine outside, and going to the beach in February. I didn’t post pictures of these things on my website here, for several reasons, one of which is that they’re not that interesting to the people who aren’t in them. That said, it was so very nice to go back to such a familiar place and to see all my friends after a year where I had almost nothing permanent in my life. I went backpacking a couple of times with my friend Michelle, including going back to the Channel Islands, which is the only thing I posted pictures of here from my time back in Santa Barbara.
One of the bucket list items I have in my life is to drive the full length of the whole West Coast. I’ve already covered all of it between San Francisco and San Diego in my car multiple times. Specifically on this trip, I would be covering the full length of US101 from where it starts in Los Angeles (where I joined it on my way from Texas to Santa Barbara), up the California Coast, through wine country, over the Golden Gate Bridge, through the heart of the Redwoods, hugging along the craggy Oregon Coast, and then up, around and over the Olympic Peninsula to its terminus in Olympia, Washington. It’s over 1500 miles long, and I’ll have covered all of it (except for about 90 miles that I will – spoiler alert – accidentally miss in Oregon).
So, when my time in Santa Barbara once again came to an end, I found myself back on the road headed way, way north – just with a couple of stops along the way.
My first stop was in the Bay Area to visit my friends where I experienced a bunch of firsts – both actual firsts, and “born again” covid firsts. We went to Napa, my first time there, and drank lots of expensive bougie wine. We went to Alcatraz, also the first time I’ve done that despite it being something I’ve wanted to do since I was a little kid (and apparently a lot of other people also weirdly have this same childhood dream to one day visit Alcatraz?? What’s that about??). We went to a REAL LIFE LIVE SPORTS EVENT, an Oakland A’s game, which was my first live sports in over a year (since I saw the Predators play in Nashville over 14 months ago)!! And we went to a lovely drag brunch, which I think was the first live performance I’ve seen since I left New Orleans. It was all a lovely hint of what life was like back in the Before Times.
After I left San Francisco and passed over the Golden Gate Bridge, I was finally heading north onto road I had never covered before. Minus one weekend in Portland and one 12-hour layover in Seattle, I had never been further north than San Francisco on the West Coast before now.
My next stop, and my last in California, was Humboldt County, home of the Redwoods. I won’t go into too much depth here because I talk about it more on my photos page, but I will say that this was on my bucket list for a reason, and I really think it should be on everyone else’s too. The coast redwoods are breathtaking in their size and age. And the coast in this section of the state is also very ruggedly beautiful too.
After several weeks in California, I finally continued my pilgrimage north and onto Oregon. California is such a huge and diverse place that no person could ever claim to know it all. There are still so many places across the state that I want to go but haven’t made it to yet (I haven’t been to Tahoe or Death Valley or Lassen Volcanic park or Point Reyes Seashore, I never got to go backpacking in Yosemite or Joshua Tree, I have several Channel Islands still left to see, and despite living there for four years I never once went surfing). But that just gives me more reason to come back again (and again and again) in the future.
This post describes land that belongs to the Chumash, Ramaytush, Ohlone, Muwekma, Patwin, Yurok, Wiyot, Mattole and Chilula people, among others.
Alyson Gagne 