The Pacific Coast Highway, California
California may be the perfect example of having too much of a good thing
One of the main reasons why someone would choose to live in a van is the never-ending ability to experience new things: new views, new restaurants, new nature, new faces, new everything, every day. If the past few years of your life felt stagnant and monotonous, you’d be craving a sense of newness, too. The more comfortable I became living in the van, the more experience I wanted to cram into as little time as possible. I’m not going to live in a van forever, so I’d better make it count.
But there is a very fine line between having new experiences living in a van and treating your life like you’re on an endless binge of excitement. Any euphoria-seeking addict will tell you that the higher you let yourself get, the harder you fall. I had to struggle through that lesson the good old-fashioned hard way along the Pacific Coast Highway.
Los Angeles
I arrived in Los Angeles about three hours before my best friend was scheduled to touchdown at LAX. After a month or so of being mostly alone and in the desert, I was eager to exert some antsy energy and have a social life again.
The only time I’d ever been to LA was with my family as a kid on our way to and from Yosemite National Park. I’ve inherited many qualities from my mother, including her expert ability to squeeze as much activity out of a single stretch of vacation as possible. “We’ll only ever be here once,” she would say as my brother and I would groan from the backseat about another pre-sunrise wake-up to drive to the next destination, “so we’re doing it all.” It was an ambitious mindset meant to maximize a frugal budget: she knew we’d remember the sites, not the grumbling; and she was right.
My best friend, Lori, and I have traveled enough together to be relatively on the same page about how much is reasonable to plan for, incorporating the same general mindset my mom: do it now, while you can. For almost a full week, we binged new experiences every day: we ate at trendy LA restaurants; we shopped in Palm Springs; we got drunk in a cowboy bar in Joshua Tree; we even got matching tattoos in Venice Beach. Even though I was meeting up with her on the road as a part of my “normal life,” we treated this trip like a full-blown vacation and went all out: may we all know the freedom of being a single 30-year-old with a little bit of disposable income and a best friend by your side. My heart was as full as my wallet was empty.
But after Lori left LA and returned to the east coast, I didn’t exactly stop the high. I continued to binge and treat my life like a vacation. After all, I’d never be there again, right?
I met up with a friend from college to have dinner and catch up. While I’ll always be sad that my friends have spread across the country, the flip side of having a transient social network is that I can count on having a good, if not a great friend in every major city in America. Much of living in the van has felt like taking a reunion tour to visit friends and family that I’d likely not plan a whole trip to see, but who I wish I lived down the street from again.
I left the van in LA and flew back to the east coast for a long-planned bachelorette party for one of my oldest friends. It was a perfect weekend of leaning into the occasion with wigs, late-night impromptu dive bar karaoke, and a skinny dip in the ocean. We were on vacation! C’mon, live a little! Again, a full heart, and an even emptier wallet. Even with this trip budgeted for months ago, I was starting to get reckless. Sometimes, you don’t catch yourself slipping into the binge.
After I returned to LA, I took refuge in the slightly less hectic world of Santa Monica at the suggestion of a friend from DC who moved there for her husband’s job. They intended to live at the beach only a few years, while the opportunity made sense, and then would return to the eastcoast when they were ready to put roots down… eventually.
Both of us working east coast hours, Lisa and I wrapped up work around 2 pm on the weekdays and met up at the Santa Monica beach a few times to smoke, talk, and just spend time near the ocean.
“I would stay here forever,” she confessed, “if it felt like a real place.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
“It’s just… it’s too perfect. Look at this place. Can you imagine raising kids in a place this perfect? They’d have no perspective of the world.”
I understood what she meant: I wouldn’t be able to explain this world to a child. My kid needs to experience the world through a lens I can contextualize. The things people care about in southern California are not the same things people care about in the rest of the country. It doesn’t feel real.
“It’s pretty much always 75 and sunny here. I don’t know if it ever really gets hot enough to swim, but people will do it later in the summer anyway,” Lisa explained to me. A con to a place too perfect to exist: no weather variance.
As we walked up and down the beach, I admired how simultaneously beautiful and disgusting this perfect place was. I longed to dive into the ocean, but no one was else swimming in the cold water without a wetsuit.
The beach itself, upon closer inspection, was dirty and disheveled. It was hard to find a spot that didn’t have cigarette butts and random scraps of trash scattered about. It didn’t matter how frequently the beach was cleaned: it was the byproduct of too many people. Another con to paradise: everyone wants to be there.
It had only been three weeks in LA - with a long weekend in Charleston sprinkled in the middle - but I had lived what felt like months of life. I squeezed every possible moment out of what little time I had. I burned through money and energy and excitement for three whole weeks like a gambler placing a promised last bet on just one more experience. That’s all I needed.
More often than we recognize, our bodies are better aware of what’s happening to us than our brains are. Even when overcome by a whirlwind of excitement and emotional highs, our bodies can intervene and make our brains fall in line instead. And despite your carnal desire for more newness and more excitement, you crash.
I left southern California in a haze of sickness and exhaustion. I was burnt out on newness, and my body was shutting down. I got achy, sustained a cough, slept terribly, and started to feel pressure enveloping my head.
To force some isolation - both for health and financial necessity - I drove north along the Pacific Coast Highway until I found the right place to stop.
Cayucos
There is liminal space between southern and northern California: where palm trees gently give way to redwoods; a space that doesn’t commit to the picturesque beauty of the south, nor the ethereal mystics of the north. It is transitional, unpretentious, and under the radar. As I fought to admit that I was definitely sick, I barreled into this liminal space as if brought there by a force of gravity. A meteor crashing to earth.
Cayucos is a small town hidden along the PCH just north of Morro Bay. Home to a state beach and quaint few blocks of shops and restaurants, Cayucos is an archetypal surf town only about 4 square miles in total. You’d miss it if you weren’t being pulled there by some force of nature.
The key to finding the perfect liminal space to illegally reside on the down-low is to find a town that is simultaneously cool with someone living in their vehicle but not advertising new people go there to do it. Locals who will accept you, but not invite you. Cayucos is the perfect place to lay in bed sick in a come-down.
I parked in a lot on the beach and proceeded to spend the next few days in an agitated state of detox: not from drugs or alcohol, per se, but from experience. Sick and tired, I opened the back doors of the van and spent an entire weekend laying in bed, making myself just be sick. I sweat and slept and binged familiar tv shows just to keep my mind off of my body’s inability to go out and take advantage of the day. After two days in bed, I had to move, and I did so by familiarizing myself with the town.
I got coffee a few mornings from a small shop on the only main street in town. Working the register, the espresso machine, and the backroom kitchen was one man, trying to keep pace with the extremely slow influx of customers. The only other person in line asked about his staff.
“Well, it’s just me for a little bit,” the man half-laughed. “I can’t get anyone else to come out and work right now.”
“What do you mean?” the other customer asked.
“It’s not like any of these young kids can live out here. They can’t afford rent. And now, they can’t even afford the gas to drive here from inland.”
He was right. I was feeling the stress of $7 a gallon for gas and my travel was optional. It’s a crisis happening all across America: cheap labor that can’t afford to live in the resort towns that need them.1
As the man behind the counter rushed between taking orders, making a latte, and taking a bagel out of the toaster over, he continued: “Plus, no one wants to work anymore.”
While this isn’t a new dog whistle,2 I started hearing it more around the time that workers were being told to go back into the office, to which many of the white-collar workers of corporate America said “no thanks!” and quit. But even worse, I heard it most often referencing the lack of service industry workers. Never mind that these minimum wage jobs can not and do not support housing in most of America,3 service industry workers died of Covid at a disproportionately high rate.4 But sure, no one wants to work anymore. I tipped him extra anyway; it's not his fault he has no one else within reach to blame.
The laid-back nature of the beach town felt painfully slow in my state of forced anchoring. I didn’t want to drive until I felt healthy again, and frankly, I was fucking broke. I was stuck in place. I paced the same stretch of beach in the mornings and the evenings. I wanted a hit of excitement but I could not find it there, as was my intention.
Each evening for four nights in a row - a long stint in my book - I sat on the beach and watched as the surfers would emerge from their parking lot midday naps and take to the low tide. The sun would sink slowly for hours, leaving increasingly deeper orange hues to the sky. Dozens of people lined up to watch their friends or family (or strangers) surf in the cold May water from the rocky beach. Every evening, as the sun set, the surfers would go out, and the community came to watch. And every evening, the sun would burn deep orange in the sky. We all stood together on the shore. It felt like a communal event.
The longer I stayed stuck, the slower I moved. I took long walks - not strenuous, exciting hikes - every morning up and down the same stretch of beach. I started passing the same few people and saying hello. I moved with the tides. I responded to the nightly call to gather with the community.
By the last day, I was begging to get into the water. I knew I couldn’t handle the freezing water and low-70s high without a wetsuit, so I visited one of the rental shops on the beach.
The owner gave me a few tips about renting a wetsuit and where to go swimming. “If I were you, I would put it on here and not take it back off until you’re done,” she explained. “Let me help you get the right size.”
She helped me squeeze into a thick wetsuit like a butcher encasing a sausage. We laughed and awkwardly bumped into each other as I squirmed into the suit, finally taking a deep breath as the last teeth of the zipper sealed. “Thank you so much, I genuinely do not understand how someone could put this on otherwise.”
She laughed, “you get used to it out here.” After chatting more, she offered me a free place to take a hot shower once I was done. She didn’t want me going back to the van after a cold swim and was looking out for me. A few familiar faces on the beach, and now, a friendly acquaintance. Stillness was fostering connection.
I drove north of town to the rocky bluffs of Estero Bay to find a place to swim. Even with a wetsuit, the late spring ocean was shockingly cold. But all it took was half an hour of intermittently floating on my back in the seaweed-filled water to feel at balance again. Down from the high, and survived the crash. Now it was time to normalize.
Mendocino
The Pacific Coast Highway north of San Francisco was colder and wetter than the rest of the drive — at this point, a welcomed change from the always sunny, always low-70s southern and mid-California coast. The density of the old-growth forest started to cloud my vision, not allowing sunlight to reach through the treetops for stretches of highway. The change in environment felt refreshing, even invigorating, yet not intoxicating. I was alert, but not overstimulated. I had reached my level out.
The Lost Coast of California is a strange mix of retired hippies, people who are over San Francisco, artists on sabbatical, and of course, cannabis farmers. As the Summer of Love ended in San Francisco, cohorts of hippies migrated to northern California in a back-to-the-land movement primarily centered around the cultivation and distribution of cannabis. Humboldt, Trinity, and Mendocino Counties still harbor the lingering, long-held tension between outlaw flower children, raid-happy cops, illegal immigrant labor, and rich, ignorant tourists.
I entered the Emerald Triangle and was eager to get off of the road for the first time in a long time. I had no service, was almost out of gas again, and didn’t want to risk how far the next station would be. So I exited the PCH to the idyllic little town of Mendocino, population 932.
I pulled into town just as the Mendocino Film Festival was kicking off and I decided to stay for a screening. Now leveled out from the chaotic highs and subsequent crash from the weeks prior, a film festival felt like an appropriately exciting new experience for a Friday evening alone.
After the documentary, I wandered the Hallmark card-like streets and learned about the town, now with a heightened degree of seriousness. I took note of the directions of the streets and the names of the shops; I studied which parking spots had what time limits; I asked around first before settling on a place to get dinner. I finally chose an Irish pub and took a seat at the bar.
If you ever want to be truly good at traveling alone, you need to be good at drinking alone. I don’t mean drink-to-numb-your-loneliness kind of good at drinking alone, I mean I-know-the-correct-amount-to-consume-right-now kind of good at drinking alone. And you can really only learn that through trial and error.
I sat alone at the bar with a book and a slow stream of the lightest, cheapest possible beer available. I read through the chalkboard on the wall that listed names of people who were owed a drink, and by whom. I paid attention to the shift in clientele from post-film festival to date night. And yes, I passively eavesdropped on the surrounding conversations.
I was more active in that moment than I had been in weeks. And as I sat at the bar, present and in-tune with my surroundings, I took out my pen and began to write — a task I’d been avoiding and lying to myself about taking seriously for months. I wasn’t hung up on what form would take or even if it made sense. Sitting at that bar, quietly enjoying writing alone, I felt a sigh of relief. I was back in an easy feeling of just being a person who lives on the road visiting a new bar, not a perpetual tourist high on vacation.
Before I rose to leave, the hostess sat down next to me at the bar after her shift and started chatting. I couldn’t resist one more round to hear her bitch about work and learn about her life. She told me about moving to Mendocino a decade prior from San Francisco, which had become “too much” for them.
“It’s beautiful and quiet here, especially in the winter. No one bothers this town in the winter,” she told me, a little too proud. They love their privacy in the Emerald Triangle; but just like any other place, it is not impermeable, just so long as you take the time to sit still enough to learn it first.
After a shot, a story about her time as a roadie for the Grateful Dead, and a failed attempt to set me up with her son, she and I parted ways forever. An enjoyable evening out with a friend for the night: not too wild, not too lonely.
Pacing in the van is always a delicate balance and a skill that is best practiced with patience for your inevitable miscalculations along the way. It’s not even realistic to try and plan in advance which days ahead of you will end up being the most exciting ones. The key is learning how to know where that drive for excitement comes from: does it feel more like curiosity, or boredom? Is the adventure to add to the story, or fill in the missing pieces? Are you seeking happiness, or a high?
I reached the anticlimactic end of the Pacific Coast Highway in Leggett, California. There isn’t a big sign or banner, just a brown mile marker pointing you back down the way you came. It was a bucket list item I was excited to check off, even if the achievement felt more like a duty than a celebration.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/20/1018501248/this-resort-towns-businesses-are-closed-because-workers-cant-afford-to-live-ther
https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2021/Out-of-Reach_2021.pdf
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/health_policy/covid-19-deaths-by-selected-census-occupations-among-united-states-resident-decedents.pdf
Oof so well said. Van life has largely taught me the value of boring!