COLUMN: Paying a price for gorgeous

By Tobin Barnes
I’m standing on Muir Beach just north of San Francisco. It’s a beautiful morning, cool but plenty of sunshine—just the way I like it.

The beach is set into a lovely cove surrounded by rocky crags on each side that descend abruptly into the sea. Along the hills of the northern side of the cove, houses are set into the landscape as if nature so intended.

This is what we came to California for—my wife, her sister Joey, her husband Chuck, and me. If it weren’t for Chuck’s cigar, the place would be idyllic. Cigar smoke can be to the ill-informed, like me, a dead thing that hangs in the air and draws attention to itself almost as intently as a streaker.

(As I’ve made plain before, Chuck is sometimes the fly in the ointment, more often the cream in the coffee.)

But nevertheless, as I stand on this beautiful beach, it would be nice to know at this moment what I’d come to know later. If that were the case, we’d stay a little longer at this spot and then from here drive over to Napa or Sonoma for the rest of the day.

Alas, such is life. We DON’T know now what we know later. And as the bard said, there’s the rub.

Having heard and read much about the scenic wonder of northern California’s Highway 1, but otherwise clueless, we had consulted a map. But maps, as you may well know, are deceptive things.

On our little map, Mendocino, our destination, is a mere inch or so away from San Francisco. In planning this happy jaunt, we had wondered what we should do with the rest of the day after nipping off this little pinch of seaside motoring.

Well..., we had thought, we’ll decide that when the time comes.

Our drive down to Muir Beach should have given us a hint as to what the rest of the excursion would be like. It was the carnival ride from hell taken to the extremes of heights and depths. Despite double yellow lines the entire way down, some knucklehead passed us in breath-taking fashion around a hair-pin curve.

Initially, we had thought he was suicidal and had planned some sort of death by scenic pleasure drive. But just a little later, we passed him as he was getting out of his car at one of those nice little hillside houses at Muir Beach. Evidently, to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time on Highway 1, you had to take hair-raisingly death-defying chances.

Uh huh, the descent to Muir Beach should have given us ample evidence of what we were getting into. But hey, we’re SoDakers. What do we know?

So after our pleasant interlude at the beach there, we forged ahead to Mendocino, advertised as a quaintly Bohemian wide-spot in the road not far up the coast.

We actually got there about six hours later. Of course, a crow could have flown it back and forth several times in those same six hours, but a crow wouldn’t have had to drive the curviest road in America.

I did.

I had to do so many 90-degee turns with that steering wheel it started squeaking in protest. Would have driven me nuts if I hadn’t had to devote my full attention to keeping us on the road.

But don’t get me wrong, the beauty of the drive truly is extraordinary. One curve after another, we’d see yet another amazing landscape of sea, beach, and bluff laid out before us. Such scenes made the torturous winding worth it...almost.

Admittedly, it would have been a better experience had we not had locals magnetized to our rear bumper, even though we were going the posted speed limit on that rollercoaster. In my rearview mirror, I could see one tradesman in a white pickup going into spasms of frustration, honking and throwing his arms up in air, because we weren’t pulling over and letting him pass.

But it was like, pull over where? No shoulders on this road. Turn-outs just every once in a while. Didn’t he know this wasn’t a commercial expressway?

Hey, buddy, this is meant to be a soothing pleasure drive.