Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Driving the California coast on Highway 1 comes with challenges.

For most of its length, CA-1 is a narrow, undivided, two-lane road that climbs and descends as the topography demands (sometimes rapidly), hugging the often precipitous coastline with switchbacks, hairpins, and a gazillion good old twists and turns. Negotiating these requires a fair bit of concentration, especially when you’ve already put hours of them behind you, and still have hours of them to go. As hard as it is on the driver, though, it’s even harder on the passengers, as they end up as little more than ballast, tossed from side to side like Kirk and Spock on the bridge of the Enterprise during a Klingon attack. While I spent about 80% of my brain power trying to achieve the optimum balance between minimizing the turn-induced, stomach-sloshing G-forces and maximizing our velocity so that we might get to the hotel by the end of check-in time, my wife, whose superpower is the ability to sleep in damned near any moving conveyance, spent several nausea-limned hours regretting our decision to take this route.

Fortunately, the California coast provides ample excuses to pull over, give one’s innards a rest,  and enjoy the scenery. We found the first excuse fairly quickly. (more…)

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