Big deal: the Giant Artichoke in Castroville. To read the start of this blog, scroll down on the right of this page, below the calendar, to the heading "Browse the archives" and click on March 2008.

We arose early our final morning after staying overnight at the Salinas Best Western (complete with foam coffee cups, plastic stirring sticks and authentic Best Western conditioning shampoo in the convenient half-ounce bottle).

We were due for a 12:33 p.m. flight on Alaska out of San Jose. We had a couple hours to kill, so rather than take a straight shot on the freeway to Silicon Valley, we detoured through the croplands on Highway 183, through Castroville and out to the bay past Santa Cruz

And we're glad we did, because otherwise we'd have never seen the Giant Artichoke, outside the Giant Artichoke Restaurant in Castroville. (We had to veer off the highway and take a photo.)

A statue of Charley the poodle sits in
the front seat of Rocinante, John Steinbeck's
camper, at the National Steinbeck Center.

SALINAS -- I got to touch Rocinante. I am dopily, nerdishly and deeply thrilled.

The main house at Hearst Castle was
modeled after a Spanish cathedral. Courtesy
Hearst Castle/California State Parks

SAN SIMEON -- Hearst Castle is a pretty amazing place to see -- no matter when you see it.

But our visit last night at sunset, when dapper men in dinner jackets waved their cigars at us and women in evening gowns and plumed hats laughed at their jokes and waited for another martini before singing along with a piano ditty, really kind of put us in the mood for the place. Just as if it were, say, 1931.

Fog blurs the line between mountains and sea along Highway 1 as it
snakes southward from Big Sur.

The road south. Weather: Brilliant sun, punctuated by fog every 5 miles or so. Driving music: Sound track from "Across the Universe" (Beatles tunes). Road trip!

At Big Sur Bakery, gallery art and the
Santa Lucia Range add to breakfast-time
attractions.

We found two places we loved for breakfast, which is the only meal we could (almost) afford to eat out at Big Sur, where everything costs more than in the rest of the physical world, because -- well, because it's in California, and it's several miles down a winding road from anywhere, and simply because it's the ethereal world of Big Sur.

As we cruised southward on this Big Sur coast where oceanfront cliffs and pyramid-like mountains (in close proximity) can still make the simple task of getting from Point A to Point B a problem requiring a pack of strong mules, I got to thinking about the folks who came to this country in its early days. What an interesting lot they must have been.

And it made me think of Tom Deasy, a local guy we had lunch with back up the coast in Capitola, near Santa Cruz.

Our little Dodge, which we've dubbed
the Billygoat (because it hugs hillsides), in
front of our cabin among the redwoods at Big Sur.

"Sur" is the Spanish word for south. So why is this place called Big South?

A ride in Andrew Molera State Park ends where
the Big Sur River enters the Pacific.

Just when I thought a horseback ride through Big Sur country was going to bolster my image as a manly man, I narrowly avoided being known as "Gigi" all afternoon.

From a pretty beach drive along Monterey Bay
in Pacific Grove, we spied this classic sailing ship
ghosting northward through the rain.

We headed south to Big Sur today, our first day of rain after three days of lovely sunshine. But the scenery didn't shrink.

Here are a few favorite photos from the drive:

A sculpture garden lures visitors to the Carmel Art
Association gallery.

The Ansel Adams photos in the Weston Gallery in Carmel were the only photos on the wall that didn't have prices.

Did John Steinbeck ever eat fudge on Cannery Row?

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream." -- Opening sentence to "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck

MONTEREY -- The good news: My daughter finished reading "Cannery Row" today, and fell in love with Steinbeck. The bad news: We visited Cannery Row today, and it wasn't anything approaching a poem. A grating noise, maybe. Perhaps a stink.

With good-humored loathing, we cursed it in the name of John Steinbeck and anybody who respects the memory of the iconoclastic old coot.

A counter-culture habitue of downtown Santa Cruz, Tom Jefferson
Scribner, who played his musical saw for passersby until his death
in the 1980s, is immortalized in this bronze sculpture by Marghe McMahon.

Santa Cruz is an interesting old hippie town -- meaning both that it's an old town, dating back to the founding of a mission here in 1791, and that it's full of interesting old hippies.

Santa Cruz Hostel, housed in historic cottages.

Where else on the California coast can you stay in quaint, historic cottages two blocks from the beach, with a charming young French woman as your hostess, have the run of a kitchen stocked with baskets of sweet oranges, rolls, bagels and other food free for the taking, and pay less per night than it probably costs you to fill your gas tank?

We arrived on a gorgeous warm day at the
Santa Cruz beach. Beware the Giant Dipper
roller coaster.

SANTA CRUZ -- Something we were NOT prepared for as we got our first glimpse of the Santa Cruz beach on a March Sunday: beach volleyball games and sun lovers in bikinis. Some people have jet lag; we had season lag. Our bodies were in sunshine, but our minds were still in the Seattle cold snap.

OK, it's California. This confirms it. These people will strip clothes off their body with little provocation. Even if the temperature is only 60.

Arriving on the weekend, we headed immediately for Santa Cruz's biggest FUN zone, the Beach Boardwalk amusement park, whose rides are open weekends only until mid-April. So this was our chance: We had to ride the historic Giant Dipper roller coaster, which, I told Lillian, is one of the oldest and biggest wooden roller coasters in America.

"And those factors together are a GOOD thing?" she asked skeptically.

I'll let her take over to tell about the experience:

We found redwoods as wide as a house.

It's no T-bird, but the little snow-white Dodge Caliber we pick up at the San Jose airport looks like a proper expedition car. Not quite an SUV, but a tough, scrappy looking little vehicle that looks ready to take on the snake-winding roads of the California coast.

And after flying out of Seattle at 8 Sunday morning with the threat of snow still in the air, by 10:30 we're on the road with the car window open, 60 degrees, sunshine streaming in and our jackets tossed in the back seat. "This climate suits me!" Lilli declares, as if she had never expected to be perfectly comfortable again.

"We're on vacation!" I crow as we turn the car toward the coast.

A view of Bixby Creek Bridge and California's
Highway 1, looking toward Big Sur. AP photo.

In "Travels With Charley in Search of America," John Steinbeck's 1962 story of driving his camper, Rocinante, from coast to coast, he wrote of "the itch" he'd had since very young, when "the urge to be someplace else was on me." People told him age and maturity would cure it. But when he wrote "Charley" at age 58, he said nothing had worked.

"The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye ... I fear the disease is incurable."

You might call this little travelogue another episode in "Travels With Lilli in Search of America." Not exactly parallel: Charley was a big poodle; Lillian is my daughter.

But we have the itch.