We have left California and are now safely(?) across the border in Oregon. A quick comment about Oregon, what’s up with no self serve gas pumps, and a nickel extra for using a card?
The road into California was through Death Valley, then around the Sierra Nevada with one stay at Paso Robles. After that it was all coastal. Of the 21 days we spent in California, only the first 3 days were summertime warm. Our first coastal stop was Monterey / Salinas. The weather was nice. Sunny, but cooler than summer weather.
I made certain that Monterey was on our itinerary. Home of John Steinbeck, the location of so many of his books. East of Eden, To a God Unknown, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, Pastures of Heaven, and so many, many more. The Steinbeck Museum in Salinas was our first stop after arriving. We spent about three hours walking through the exhibits that mostly emphasized just the most famous of his enormous output. But all of his work had one common thread and a film clip by his wife some time after Steinbeck’s death captured it all. She spoke about going to a performance of “Of Mice and Men” in Paris. She sat down and noticed the stage set was all wrong, and had expected that his work was being misrepresented. The play, she explained turned out to be the best performance of that play she had ever seen. The reason, was that John Steinbeck’s literature was not of a setting, it was people in a setting. And the stories he wrote can be moved from one setting to another, because it was about people.
Later we walked the three blocks from the museum to his birthplace. John Steinbeck was born in a lovely home in Salinas that still stands and operates as a lunch restaurant and gift shop. While we did not have lunch, but the wait staff was kind enough to let us into the front room of the home, where John Steinbeck was born. They talked a little to us about his life in the house and his family. They even let us take pictures.
The next day we spent mostly on Cannery Row in Monterey. The streets are filled with tourist gift shops, restaurants, and fancy hotels. So unlike the Cannery Row he wrote about. However, I think John Steinbeck would have mourned the passing of the old and then gone out and celebrated with a drink or two or three that the memory lives on and people there are now doing well.
The rest of the California journey was up the coast, San Francisco, Porto Bodego, and the Redwoods. All memorable and significant, but I really came to talk about the weather. Foggy, every morning, chilly all the time – even when the temp managed to creep up to or near 70. Most days the fog never really burnt away, others it just remained cloudy. I know I could never live on California’s northern coast, it clouds the mind as much as it clouds the air. Most of the time we had a great time, but as in a bad novel, there as was always a cloud putting the damp on everything.
So now we move on to Portland in a couple of days, then we begin our journey eastward. I just spent 3 memorable weeks in California, I have checked out.
