Sunday (part one)

I spent the night on the floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, in considerably nicer conditions than I would be experiencing for a long time. Courtney's family had been in town for a wedding and were leaving the next day; we went out to breakfast at the famous Lori's Diner, and returned to the room to make our first hostel reservation at a little lighthouse in Point Montara, an hour's drive south of the city. This meant that we had plenty of time to stand in the Labor Day Weekend line at Enterprise, under a sign that warned that the area was known by the state of California to contain chemicals that were hazardous to one's health. Excellent. But sooner or later we got our car, and it was a Chevrolet HH that looked a lot like a PT Cruiser, and I offered Courtney moral support up the hills and out of the city and then we were on the freeway and there were palm trees and it was all happening.

Once we hit route one my co-piloting duties were about 100% reduced, so I leaned back and cranked up some Manu Chao. Life was getting pretty good. We passed a beach and decided to go to it just because we could. The parking lot was filled with shirtless surfers and its lucky we didn't crash, since neither pilot nor co-pilot were paying attention to anything remotely to do with driving at that point. We pulled ourselves together just enough to try to find a parking space, but there were none, so we settled for circling very slowly a few more times to take in the views before returning to the road.

After a brief ascent through a wooded forest, the road opened up and then there was route one in all its glory. Nothing but sun and surf and jagged cliffs as far as the eye could see. Courtney swerved left into a dusty parking lot after a particularly scenic point, and we quickly assembled sunscreen, towels, magazines, and picknicking supplies before trotting happily after some more shirtless surfers down the hill.