TO INFINITI AND BEYOND FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO PORTLAND
Rosemary Behan drives up the scenic coastal route from California to Oregon
As car hire offices go, the Mountain View branch of Hertz is probably as good as it gets. A smart little art deco-style cubicle used to dealing with executives from nearby Google, Facebook and Apple, the staff are young, earnest and smart. Seeing I’ve travelled from the UAE, one of the guys proudly tells me I’ve been upgraded from a Ford Focus to a new Infiniti Q50. “It just came in,” he says. It’s a beautiful car, which is a relief as I’ve got a lot of ground to cover in the next few days.
About 1,500 kilometres, to be exact. Although I could cover the drive north to Portland in 10 hours non-stop using highways, I’m taking three days to take in the scenery. A trip down the Oregon coast from Canada back in 2000 had always left me pining for a return. Setting off from Mountain View at 9.30am, I quickly stop off at Google’s main campus, to visit a friend who works there. On the way I see two of the company’s self-driving cars glide along the street, so small and smooth they look like part of a futuristic rail system. A saturated blue sky is stretched behind the blossoming trees of spring, as some of the most unassuming but expensive real estate in the world passes by.
I have breakfast in one of the many restaurants – one would hesitate to call them staff canteens. The designer architecture and myriad choices of complimentary organic food and drinks, not to mention the free bikes, massages and other perks, put Google in the A-list of tech employers.
There’s also time for a quick taster from the barbecue ribs van in the car park, which has just started preparing the staff lunch as if it’s a food festival, and then I’m on my way. The car glides along like a dream, though by battling against the less scenic route that the NeverLost satellite navigation system wants me to follow, I end up driving all the way through downtown San Francisco to reach the Golden Gate Bridge. I hit traffic south of Santa Rosa – and an accident – so it’s later than I would have liked that I reach the bucolic road west through Sonoma farmland to Bodega Bay.
It’s not like it looks in Hitchcock’s The Birds – less bleak – although the sites used in the film require more time to explore and I need to get to Eureka by 8pm. Highway 1 is narrow – a lane in each direction in places – and there are cars in front and behind. But what’s great about doing the drive north is that traffic gets progressively lighter, especially in northern California and southern Oregon, where at times I felt like I was the only one on the road.
The Sonoma Coast State Park and the small settlement of Sea Ranch remind me of the scenery near Big Sur, south of San Francisco, although it isn’t as dramatic. The real beauty, for me, starts north of Fort Bragg, where, thanks to depopulation, the rugged stretch between Rockport and Ferndale is known as the Lost Coast.
Alas, I don’t have time to disappear here either, so I try to carry on inland to where Highway 1 merges with the 101. Unfortunately, the road ahead is closed, and a local man directs me to a “shortcut” through Branscomb, an offthe-grid community in Mendocino County. The road winds endlessly through woods into the mountains, and soon I’ve got a panoramic view of the northern California coast. Yet the lack of other vehicles or petrol stations is worrying, and the satnav is confused.
I’ve lost valuable time, but eventually I hit the 101. As I approach the 53,000-acre Humboldt Redwoods State Park, I see signs for a “Scenic Alternative”. Though the road I’m on is already very scenic and evening has arrived, I turn off onto what is known as the Avenue of the Giants. For about 20km, I drive on a perfectly smooth, quiet, tarmacked road between towering redwoods. It’s like being in a video game. Getting out of the car, I breathe in air heaving with life. Sadly, these are some of the last remaining examples of the redwood forests that once covered much of the California and Oregon coast, and one of the last remaining redwood forests on Earth. Here, there are 17,000 acres of old-growth redwoods, making it the largest such forest in the world. Some trees are 110 metres high and up to 2,200 years old.
On the northern exit of the park, rivers flow through forested gorges to the sea, and the lack of development still makes you think of the pioneer days of the Old West. I pass Scotia – an old lumber town – and Ferndale – an ornate Victorian offshoot – before crossing an agricultural plain on the approach to Eureka.
After so much beauty, my first impressions of Eureka are surprising. An ugly dual carriageway