A quickie on the Golden State:

We’re just back from a college visit/mini vacation to Central California. It’s the third time we’ve gone to California with Luke: Once to San Diego and Southern California, once to San Francisco and Yosemite, and this time from San Francisco, down the coast toward San Luis Obispo and back up to the Bay Area.

The highlight of this trip — and we’ve enjoyed all of them — probably was the drive down Highway 1 through Big Sur, 90 miles of mountains and ocean scenery unlike any in America.

Now, the drive itself is a little challenging. The road is winding and hilly. The weather — as always, I’m told — wasn’t ideal. Worse, the tourists were out in droves. I guess that’s pretty normal, too, from what I’ve read.

It’s a little hard to commune with nature, let’s face it, when you’re jockeying for a parking spot. It’s disconcerting, amid the fog on the hills, the magnificent cliffs, the waves pounding the rocks just offshore, the grasses and flowers and trees and the wind that sweeps through it all, dealing with some jabbering tourist wielding a selfie stick.

But it says a lot about Big Sur — and, I think, California as a whole — that it’s all still worth it.

 

I’m trying not to overstate this — and, already, this post is longer than I wanted it to be — but I think we all need places like Big Sur. At least I do. I need it to snap me out of a life that’s too filled with cul de sacs and Target stores and ballgames and a great place to have a hamburger. I need it to show me true natural beauty is more than finely trimmed hedges and well-placed trees along interstates.

Places like Big Sur (and this place) are good — and more, necessary — for the soul. And, really, I don’t think that’s overstating it. So I’ll leave it there.