California, February to April 2021

After a year of being gone from California, and a year of being on the road, I started 2021 with an extended trip back to my old home. I ended up spending a couple of months, visiting my friends and doing all the Santa Barbara things, but I’m only including a handful of highlights from my time here.

Channel Islands National Park – Santa Rosa Island

The Channel Islands are one of the least visited parks in the National Park system – and understandably so, because they require a boat to get to, and there is only one boat company that runs commercial trips. There are five separate islands you can visit within the national park, and I’ve already been to the most popular one, Santa Cruz. On this trip my friend Michelle and I visited Santa Rosa Island, which is farther away, gets fewer boats arriving per week, and receives fewer visitors. We stayed for two nights, which gave us time to go on a couple of great hikes, including the spectacular Lobo Canyon, with wind sculpted canyon walls that open out onto a beautiful rugged rocky shoreline.

Napa Valley and San Francisco

When I left Santa Barbara, I headed up the coast to San Francisco to visit with my friends there. For the first couple of days we visited Napa Valley, drinking wine, going to a mineral spa, and having a bougie couple of days away. When we came back to SF, we fulfilled a childhood dream to visit Alcatraz, saw my first live sports in over a year at a socially distanced Oakland A’s game, and caught a drag brunch. Overall, a brief but triumphant visit to the Bay Area.

Humboldt County and Redwoods Area

The whole time I lived in California I wanted to visit the Redwoods, but never made it happen because they are just too damn far away (about an 11 hour drive from SB – California is fuckin huge, man). So I could not complete my crawl up the West Coast without stopping here. It’s unbelievably beautiful country, and so different from southern California that I kept forgetting I hadn’t left the same state. The redwoods are so beautiful and so unbelievably massive. They can be almost 400 feet tall and almost 30 feet wide, and some are almost 2000 years old – taller than the Statue of Liberty, wide enough to park a truck behind and not see the truck, and almost as old as Jesus Christ. They are some of the largest and oldest living things on earth. I have said here before that I like going to places that make me feel small, but I’ve never been to a place that makes me feel it quite so literally as walking through the redwoods does. The trees are so big that it feels like an optical illusion – like a “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” style joke. I tried, but I think I ultimately fell short of truly capturing their size and scale in photos.