Discovering the Untouched Beauty of California

Everybody who says they know California means about four hundred miles of it. We went north of that, past the point where the traffic thins and the radio gives up, and spent nine days somewhere that does not photograph well and is much better in person.

The route

Arcata up to the Oregon line, then inland and back down through the forest. We averaged about sixty miles a day, which sounds lazy and is not, because the roads are not the kind you make time on and because stopping is the entire point.

The fog is the main character. It comes in most afternoons and takes the temperature down fifteen degrees in twenty minutes, and every local we met had opinions about it that were closer to weather-as-neighbor than weather-as-topic.

Three places I would send anyone

The groves before nine in the morning. Not for the light, which is fine, but for the quiet. The trees do something to sound that I have never encountered anywhere else — you notice it in your chest before you notice it in your ears.

The tide pools at the bottom of a path that the guidebook does not name. Ours was a quarter mile past a pullout with three cars in it. Ask in the shop. Somebody will tell you, and they will be pleased to be asked.

Any diner with a hand-lettered sign and a full parking lot at 7 a.m. This rule has never once failed me anywhere in the country.

The part that will annoy you

There is no cell service for large stretches, the weather makes a nonsense of plans, and half the places worth stopping at have no website and irregular hours. We drove forty minutes to a bakery that was shut.

We did not resent the bakery being shut. We resented having built the morning around it, which was our mistake and not the bakery’s.

By day four we had stopped planning past lunch, and the trip got substantially better. This appears to be the standard arc and I have never managed to skip to the end of it.

What it cost

$1,310 for nine days, two people, including the car. Most of the saving is that there is very little to buy. The expensive version of this trip does not exist, which is the nicest thing I can say about anywhere.