Totally Unauthorized

Our week at the beach in LA is up.  We packed everything and hit the road for home yesterday about 10 am.

Since we had no plans and no place we needed to be, Gail and I thought it might be nice to motor on up highway 101.  It’s longer and slower, but much prettier and I-5 is just boring.

It was almost a good idea, but the route from Oxnard to Santa Barbara was miserable with heavy traffic.  From Santa Barbara to Salinas is beautiful.  Gentle rolling hill, winding roads, thousands of acres of vineyards.

Which made me think: what is the effect on the world of devoting so much of our arable space to growing things which we know are bad for us?  Consider how much acreage is devoted to growing wine grape.  Tobacco.  Cocaine.  Opium poppies.  With people starving and rapidly diminishing energy and water supplies, is this something the people of the world should be doing?

I realize that farmers grow what makes them the most money.  If spinach were more profitable than merlot, they’d grow spinach.  So why are we valuing destroying our livers and lungs over feeding the starving?

Okay, back to the trip.

Although it is my absolute favorite roadside stop, Gail wouldn’t eat  at Pea Soup Andersons in Buellton, so we had to go into San Luis Obispo and find a decent restaurant.  Lunch was really good, it just wasn’t pea soup with all the mix-ins. SLO is a very pretty little town, with good places to eat and shop, so it’s a nice diversion on the way home.

This is what it looked like as we got up to the 156 turnoff towards Monterey:

The human version of what a sled dog sees. Photo by Gail.

A roadside grass fire caused a 40 minute back-up as we crawled so the lookie-lous could gawk at the big men in their red trucks.  Fortunately for us, it was on the other side of the road, since the southbound backup extended over 10 miles and must have delayed people 2 or 3 hours.

Once into Gilroy, the road was clear and fast, and we pulled into the driveway about 7 pm, making it a 9 hour trip including our leisurely lunch.  The rest of the family zoomed up the central valley, scarfed lunch at Fosters Freeze and were home in just over 6 hours.

I enjoyed the drive and the views, but wouldn’t want to sit in that traffic again.  I guess I’ll have to stick with the fast and boring way in the future.