Let’s be honest. If you live in the Northwest you need a pretty good reason to drive to LA. If you don’t have a lot of time, it is 1250 miles of really boring freeway driving. If you do have enough time to make it interesting, you are really going somewhere else and ending up in LA. But if you take the time to drive back up along the coast (as you must), with the great Pacific Northwest as your reward at the end, it is wonderful. So I have done that part twice in the last 15 months. To be fair it is partly because LA is automotive mecca. If you like to look at cars, work on cars, build things for cars … it is hard to beat. If you like driving cars … not so much. The first trip was to pick up the Aston from an exotic car terminal / storage place. This was quite humbling to this owner of his first exotic, surrounded by collector cars, hyper luxe cars, and even higher model Astons. I have to admit the interior of a Rolls Royce Phantom is a very nice place to be. Like a private room in a very expensive and very exclusive night club. I imagine.

The second trip was to help pick up a Happier Camper, manufactured in LA. So cute it consistently got more comments and waves than the Aston. Mildly irritating for that, but super fun otherwise. So I drove down to LA with a couple of small diversions to make it bearable.

View 3-day Seattle to LA route in Maps

The first diversion was Lava Beds National Monument via Klamath Falls, a very nice drive, in parts, after getting off I-5 in Eugene and onto Highway 58. Lava Beds is a lightly visited gem with an impressive lava-covered landscape and an impressive collection of lava tubes to explore. Some of them are so deep and cold that they have year round ice at the bottom. Very dark. Very cold. Less claustrophobic are the petroglyphs at the northwest corner of the park, carved at a time when the nearby lake lapped up against the rock promontory of Petroglyph point, now high and dry.

Sadly, we had to press on, but the lava filled plateau of central Oregon makes for very straight and fast roads. The aptly named Stateline Road follows the border of California and has three almost imperceptible bends in 20 miles. From there south on Highway 97 you pass through Dorris and then it is straight as an arrow for another 20 miles. Most of the rest of the trip down Highway 97 is rewarded with glorious views of Mount Shasta. Just before getting back on the freeway south we stopped for lunch in Weed, at a place advertised as Asian American Barbecue, with stacks of wood and a busy smoker out front. Ordered the everything plate which was lovingly prepared with a cleaver. Eating excellent street food in a parking lot with a view of Mt. Shasta felt pretty regal.

Once back on I-5 there was a stop to visit a friend and the fabulous Flamingo Motel in Santa Rosa. The last stretch from I-5 to Santa Rosa via Calistoga on Highways 20 and 29 is classic California driving. More hairpins than I could count going over Mt. St. Helena, then across wine country at the north end of Napa Valley, and more lovely twisties over into Sonoma Valley. A short jaunt to Healdsburg was richly rewarded with dinner at the Gallery Bar and Bistro. OK, dining al fresco in California in the winter is better than doing so in Seattle.   

Between breakfast at Hank’s Creekside (very nice) and LA on the freeways, there was only one redeeming moment, in Avenal. Great, authentic, Mexican food in the pistachio capital of the world.  5 minutes off the freeway. Ricas carnitas at Tacos y Tortas “Chalios”.  A cornucopia of smoked, braised and roasted meats. Lovingly smashed into a torta with a cleaver. Something about watching your food being prepped with a cleaver hits a primeval pleasure center. I was happy not to be a vegetarian. 

On to LA.  Nothing notable to report beyond more Rolls Royces. 7 on the way to dinner and back. Always in the company of black-clad thugs, presumably being well paid to loiter.  Not a world I inhabit. The visit to Happier Camper, in contrast, was a delight.  A few blocks from where Rolls Royces go to dine they are churning out wonderful little lightweight retro campers.  Easily towed by, for example, a Volkswagen Golf.

View 3-day LA to Arcata route in Maps

Leaving LA could be such a pleasure. But it feels like you never really leave. It just peters out gradually along whatever freeway. 37 suburbs in search of a city without an inversion layer, as they say. (Note to self: turn off Comments on this one) At any rate, headed for the coast behind the trailer with a different speed limit and very different driving experience as the “support” vehicle. On the plus side, there was a guaranteed place to sleep at the end of the day. Though not a guaranteed place to park in Morro Bay State Park. To curb the pandemic (?) they were only allowing two vehicles per site where the 1100 lb trailer counted as a vehicle. Though the campground is check-by-jowl RVs the location is stunning and well worth the stopover. There is (non-pandemic) an museum of natural history overlooking the expanse of the bay, dunes beyond, a small marina, the town itself and Morro Rock. Lovely. The town is just on the other side of a golf course, and served up all-you-can-eat crab on Wednesday night. No cleaver, but dismembering your own food is similarly primal. Thus we ditched the tow car and entertained the neighbors with this …

From there the PCH is a joy but was closed due to landslides before Big Sur. This was a great disappointment, moderated by what turned out to be a very nice drive east from Cambria, on 41 through Los Padres forest, over San Carlos Pass and across the rolling Diablo Range. There was then a long sad drive through no man’s land to get to I-5. The desolate landscape and driving the speed limit behind a trailer saps your will to live. We somehow missed the significance of the James Dean Memorial Junction.

I-5 brought us back up to Santa Rosa and Sugarloaf Ridge State Park. Road trips make me happy, but at this point I was irked by two things: (1) driving a sports car at trailering speeds (2) said trailer still getting more attention than my hand-built beauty. All that went away when we pulled into the campground and a, perhaps, 7-year-old black kid in the neighboring site greeted us with “Aston Vantage. Nice. V8 or V12?”. This made my trip and earned him a tour around the park (though I don’t think he could see over the dashboard) as well as the privilege of helping me top up my oil. The little prodigy later heard something, looked across the campground and up into mountains at a distant car. “Another sports car. Nissan GT-R.” Wow. I’m pretty convinced his first car will be an Aston.

Sugarloaf Ridge is where the Happier Camper came into its own. The campground is nice but a little primitive. No power, no water and no cell signal to order pizza. A comfortable, self-contained, home away from home is a very nice thing. With the optional heater would have been even nicer. No complaints. An added bonus was this campground’s solution to social distancing, which was to put a Honey Bucket in each site. The logic was lost on me but I have now experienced a personal, private mobile toilet.

Camping fireside video coming soon

Sonoma Valley was a day off from driving / trailering and our host treated us to a fabulous brunch in Sebastopol followed by “Champagne” tasting at the nearby Iron Horse Vineyard. A lovely spot to chillax. Our host was rewarded with a short but apparently terrifying spin in the Aston. No good deed went unpunished.

Pushing on north, and missing a lot of beautiful sights, it was nonetheless inevitable to have majestic ocean views, and in northern California to see redwoods. The Avenue of the Giants is barely a detour and quite humbling. An excellent layover, previously unknown to me, was Arcata on Humboldt Bay. Arcata is a Victorian mining, logging and shipping town with a nice central plaza. Arriving on a Friday evening the plaza was occupied by the sketchiest crew I can remember seeing in such numbers, despite living around some very sketchy folk. Very loud. All night. But the grand old Hotel Arcata on the plaza was fine. Nice bed. Good sushi.

The plaza was completely transformed on Saturday morning, with a fabulous, socially distanced farmer’s market. Stocking up for future campfires was a treat, but it was quickly time to press on and cover more miles back to Seattle.

NorCal driving video coming soon

The next waypoint was another new-to-me experience a little off the beaten path: Netarts Bay near Tillamook, Oregon. To get there you peel off Highway 101 and head west across farmland and then up the coast. About 15 miles. Aston appropriate. Weekend campsites during the pandemic were hard to come by, and the State parks were all full, so we snagged the last site in a private / commercial RV park. What a revelation a for-profit setup was. Clean, modern, full service facilities in a beautiful setting on the water. And, strangely, more economical that sites in the famous parks. Aston. Economical. There, I just used those two words in the same paragraph. A first.

Pulling into Netarts as the sun was setting over the bay was stunning. Not having to set up a tent in the fading light was very welcome. As this was the last night of the trip it was exciting to have finally found a propane canister for the camper’s stove and settle down to cook the bounty of the Arcata farmer’s market. Propane, like campsites, was impossible to come by in the preceding 1,000 miles despite much time wasted searching. It was then it was discovered that the camper’s stove ran, in fact, on alcohol.

Netarts sunset video coming soon

There is little photographic record of the last stretch home. It was a little too well known and the end of a trip a little too disheartened to be inspired. So we’ll end with crossing the bridge from Astoria back into Washington …