Everyone knows California, don’t they? It’s pretty good at self-promotion and has a familiarity acquired from decades of movies and TV.  There’s the odd ‘nugget of wonder’ to be found, but overlanding California isn’t really a surprise. If we have one Top Tip for California it’s ‘winter’. In winter we find crowd-free parks and coasts. We also find hippy-nirvana in the desert, TV sets, elephant seals, a super-cool city, very big trees and a winning streak at the casino!         

SoCal Desert

If you’re one of the cool kids on the block, you’ll know Southern California as ‘SoCal’.  These abbreviated names are all the rage in these parts, you know. 

SoCal has a densely populated coast with cities like San Diego and Los Angeles, but the inland is little more than a desolate wilderness. Out there in the SoCal desert is a hippy ‘alternative’ community, sitting slap-bang in the middle of one of the planet’s most inhospitable places. Slab City is a vast area populated with society’s escapees, all shacked-up in clapped-out old campervans, rickety trailer-homes and make-shift contraptions of sticks and shredded canvas. Scattered throughout this community are random art installations (using ‘art’ in the most imaginative sense possible here) – curious, quirky, creative pieces resourcefully collated from discarded junk.

The single largest and most striking piece of art is Salvation Mountain, a huge colourful painted hillside, an homage to the religious thinking of some Slab City burghers. But the collection known as ‘East Jesus’ is also particularly whacky. At first glance it all appears rather thoughtlessly thrown together, but considerable thought and effort has gone into this art. Only when you see other similar but less effective ‘copy-cat’ communities nearby, do you realise the success of the art in Slab City.

Slab City is said to be lawless. Police apparently decline to patrol the ‘streets’ and it’s said to be an anonymous, tax-free, rule-free nirvana. The community boasts a self-proclaimed status of ‘The Last Free Place’. Wow! Life with no rules, eh? Every kid’s dream. But the first thing we heard was children being admonished for climbing on the ‘art’. Even wild and free hippies need some rules to live by😉.

A teeny bit further north in the SoCal desert is Joshua Tree National Park. This has been on my Bucket List ever since the iconic U2 album of the ‘80s (probably the last vinyl record I bought before the ‘CD revolution’ – whatever happened to them, eh?). What was this strange tree? Where did it grow? Now, after three fabby days of hiking amongst said trees in the stunning mountains and blissful weather of the SoCal desert winter, we’re wiser.

L.A.

Now… you don’t need to be one of the cool young kids to know the abbreviation for Los Angeles. It’s been around a while. But whilst visiting the city we found a great park-up spot in ‘NoHo’. Any idea? North Hollywood. Obvious (apparently). These terms are so well used around here that even the signs in the Metro stations are abbreviated, so you gotta know your stuff to find your way around.

Hollywood is famously the centre of the movie industry, with tourism being a major hanger-on to that theme. A small fortune could be spent on theme parks, bus tours to celebrity neighbourhoods, yardy, yardy, yardy. We chose to hang-out in LA for a few days, do a couple of museums on the entertainment theme (the Hollywood Museum and the Grammys Museum) plus a ‘behind the scenes’ tour at Warner Bros studios. We saw street-sets where various notable movie and tv moments had taken place, Harry Potter props/stuff (which thanks to JK Rowling’s insistence, had all actually been filmed at WB’s London studios 😊), super-hero costumes, demonstrations of movie production and sound-creations, but for us the best bits were the sets of two of our favourite tv series: Big Bang Theory and Friends. It’s a fun tour afternoon and worth a visit.     

Santa Monica is LA’s sea-side town and what a seriously cool place this is. We took the excellent Metro down there on Saturday afternoon and hung around the pier for sunset. Most seaside pier towns with fun-fairs tread a difficult line between ‘fun for all ages’ and ‘down-market cheese’. Santa Monica, ably assisted by Mother Nature’s spectacular sunsets, has absolutely got the balance right. It’s also marks the end of the famous Route 66. We had a lovely time there and really enjoyed the atmosphere.

Big Sur

Heading north out of LA up the coast, we’d heard great things about the spectacular Big Sur drive. It’s true, it is indeed a beautiful stretch of (relatively, by California standards) unspoiled and undeveloped rugged coast. But the highlight for us was the elephant-seal colony. These chaps brought back happy memories of watching their cousins on wild, remote beaches back in Argentina. Obviously, this being California rather than the Patagonia, we don’t get to enjoy this alone. Nope. It’s crowd-free, but even in winter you’re never far away from the next guy. January to March is peak -activity season in the life of an elephant seal and they get no privacy for their mating and birthing.

Cruising on up the coast, we hit the manicured and exclusive little pueblo of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Hmmm… Carmel… Carmel… why does that ring a bell??? Ah yes… of course… Clint!! Remember the news back in the 80s? Clint Eastwood elected Mayor of Carmel!! You’d probably need Clint’s bank balance to live here, but it’s a nice enough place to stop for a ‘Go ahead. Make my day’ coffee.

Yosemite

Common mistakes about Yosemite National Park. First, it’s not Yose-mite, it’s Yo-se-mi-te. Curious, but that’s how you say it. Secondly, there is no Yogi Bear there. He’s from Yellowstone. We’ll get to Yogi one day, but for now we’re heading to Yosemite. On the way we dropped into Sequoia NP where we find a big tree. A very big tree. General Sherman is the biggest in the world, apparently. Remember this point, we’ll come back to the ‘big tree’ thing in a mo.

Meanwhile, back in Cuthbert… we’re en-route to Yosemite with dire warnings still ringing in our ears: “beautiful but crowded… traffic jams… crowds… no camp spaces… crowds… book months ahead… and crowds, there’ll be crowds”. It seems these doomsday-prophets haven’t been there mid-winter. We just drove in, got a camp-spot and wandered the trails with the occasional greeting to a fellow hiker. Not even a teeny little embryonic crowd in sight. Okay… it is a bit nippy at night and a few of the more challenging high-altitude trails are closed (the ones we’d struggle with anyway) but generally, no probs. Yosemite is stunning, so go winter and beat the crowds, people!

If you’re going to San Francisco…

We’re not signed-up members of the ‘Big City Fan Club’; over our travels only a few have tempted us to hang around. Lima, or Mexico City maybe. But San Francisco was tough to leave. Parking up on the water-front within sight of the iconic bridge, lovely  promenades and parks for walks in the glorious weather, neighbourhoods of quirky houses, fun trolley-buses tinging their bells as they roll up and down the mountain-steep streets, excellent coffee bars, interesting tourist attractions… we had just the BEST time there. Add to all this, a long-awaited visit to our lovely friends Mark, Anna and Freya who have relocated from UK, and you have a dream few days in our USA trip. If only we had more time on our US visas, we’d still be enjoying San Fran now 😊      

One of the many interesting things in San Fran is Alcatraz prison island (remember those escape movies? The Rock?) It’s the third prison island we’ve visited on our travels, after the Papillon Island in French Guiana and Robben Island in South Africa. Alcatraz’s story doesn’t have the tragic, desperate inhumanity of Robben Island, all Alcatraz inmates were dangerous guys deserving of incarceration. But it’s still a fascinating visit and thought-provoking to imagine being shut in the cells within sight and sound of one of the world’s most fabulous cities.

Tree Sized

Dragging ourselves away from San Francisco over that iconic bridge, we took the spectacular coast road north (incidentally… a bit more wild and remote than Big Sur) which eventually led us to a familiar topic: big trees (this time, giant redwoods). The astute reader will recall that the sequoia General Sherman claims to be the biggest tree in the world. But by now you’re surely wondering about this guy… is he the tallest? The fattest? Or merely an imposter? Allow us to put you out of your misery.

There are several ways to calculate the ‘biggliest’ when it comes to trees. The El Tule tree in Mexico has (by a looong way) the fattest/widest trunk. The giant redwoods we now find on the north Californian coast are (by some distance) the tallest. What General Sherman has is the biggest total mass of the trunk. That’s how he claims to be the biggest.

Amongst the giant redwoods of north California is a tree so large that a tunnel has been cut through the trunk for cars to pass. Unfortunately, they didn’t have vehicles the size of Cuthbert in mind when they cut the hole. He didn’t fit, but it was a cool thing to see.

The Gambling Game

And finally in the news today… a win-win story. We’re not big on gambling. In fact, over several days back in Las Vegas we spent not one cent on the town’s most famous activity. But sometimes, casinos make a convenient and free overnight park-up spot. All you have to do is register your vehicle at the desk and they give you a free $10 inducement each to fritter away in their den of iniquity. If their intended trick was to get us sat at a slot machine, it worked. Out of idle curiosity we chose a machine and giggled like school kids as we tried to work-out the system, recklessly pressing the flashy buttons at random. The slot machine whizzed, ping-ed and kept congratulating us on our ‘bonus wins’. At the end of my free $10, I had won the vast sum of $2.25. Marcus won a more attractive $25. Happy days.

Few nights later… another casino… another $10 each for us to bash away on the machines. Still no real clue as to what we’re doing, but again arbitrarily pressed the buttons to see what happens. This time my winnings on my free $10 dropped to a pathetic 25 cents😕. Marcus ‘Man with the Golden Touch’ Tuck won a whopping $48. The intention of the casinos was no doubt to get us hooked, spending the evening mindlessly pressing buttons to the advantage of their coffers. Instead we went away happy (and richer) bunnies 😊  

California Dreaming

So as the clock ticks down on our US visa time and hurtles alarmingly towards the exit bell, we leave California with less than four weeks to get to Canada. Overlanding California might not be the world’s most adventurous destination, but people flock here from all over the world with good reason. I’m sure California will be pleased to learn that we are placing it alongside Texas as our (joint) favourite state in the USA. So far. 

Now Oregon and Washington await…