We woke to a spectacular sunrise in the desert before starting our journey. We would skirt north of the City of Angels through Pasadena and Burbank / Hollywood before finally popping out on the coast at Ventura. It was a Saturday and we left early to beat the infamous SoCal traffic. Things got progressively thicker as we neared the coast. Seems like everyone was headed to the beach!
I vividly remember one of the first times I drove 101 South from Santa Maria to Los Angles. Around Ventura, the west side of the highway falls away exposing a fantastic vista of the Pacific.
Ventura highway in the sunshine
Some 70s Yacht Rock Band
Where the days are longer
The nights are stronger
Than moonshine
It wasn’t quite the same in fog and heavy traffic – but nearly 50 years later I had returned.
The typical weather pattern for SoCal is early morning clouds from the cool Pacific that burn off by noon. We stopped at a 6-mile stretch of beach right along the coast where you can boondocks camp (if you get an early enough reservation, I learned!). There were a lot of surfers and billion-dollar homes on the ocean.
As I drove into the mountains from Santa Barbara toward San Marcos Pass it all came back to me! When I first was living here I spent some time in the area with the people I was diving with. I fell in love quickly with California – there really is no place like it with its golden hue. You could see that it had rained a lot because everything was green. Later some of it will dry out and catch fire. Neverending cycle for Califonia.
We arrived at the Avila Beach KOA late in the afternoon. It is a stone’s throw from the beach and about 10 miles from San Luis Obispo. When we got there it was packed – the sites were full (unlike all the others so far) and jammed very close together.
After Sunday though it cleared out with less than half the sites full. The campgrounds suffered bad flooding from all the rain and winter weather but seemed in good repair. The pool had just been recently repaired and reopened.
Very close to the campground was the Bob Jones trail. This ran about 4 miles to the beach and was very popular. We walked part of it a couple of times. The first part has some interesting rock formations and there are some very large live oak trees precariously growing out of rock.
We drove the Avila Beach – again – it all came back to me. I remember diving on the oil pier for Halibut that first summer I got here. Lots of great memories! There is an off-lead dog beach just north of that that we visited. I read an article a couple of days earlier that the average home price in Avila Beach was $1.9M. A really far cry from the sleepy little town I barely remember when I lived here.
Shell Beach
My girlfriend had hooked up with the local dive shop before I got there. Honestly, the guy that ran the store wanted to get into her pants. That’s another story π€£. They were up for diving though! These guys were hardcore spearfishermen and would go diving any hour of the day or night. We must have dove a dozen spots that summer including diving in the surf at Pismo Beach for clams! The shop they worked at was Dive West.
I also helped them teach classes. Shell Beach was our teaching spot. They were hardcore about teaching too. All of their time in the water was in the ocean rather than a pool. Their philosophy was that you needed to be able to handle the rigors of Pacific diving. This means rocks, an unbelievably strong tidal surge at times, wearing a bulky wetsuit (and climbing stairs!), and hand-numbing cold. It can be a bit overwhelming for some. They would also let you take as many classes as needed to become certified.
The area is now littered with million-dollar homes. Seems like Teslas are as common as old VW Beetles back in the day π.
Pismo Beach
Pismo Beach itself has blown up into a destination for everyone. Hotels, restaurants, and t-shirt shops are everywhere. Plenty of places to get rid of those cumbersome wads of cash π°.
One of the dives I went on with my new dive buddies was Pismo Beach. Here’s the picture: On a calm day you dive out in the surf, maybe 6 feet underwater. You take out your dive knife and poke around in the sand until you hit something. That would be the clam. Dig it up and stick it in a bag. All the time the surge is moving you back and forth!
I had some yummy clam chowder though at one of the recommended restaurants near the pier. It was delicious but I seriously doubt it had any Pismo Beach clam in it!
Cal Poly
I seriously had no clue what I wanted to do when I graduated from high school. I had applied (and been accepted) at Florida State in their chemistry program. That’s how clueless I was because chemistry is not my thing! My Dad was big on going to the local community college and then transferring to a four-year school. I was able to get some CLEP credit and cut the time required at the community college to three semesters.
I was staying in Boston with my friend Billy the summer after graduation. My girlfriend calls to tell me her parents are moving to California. She also told me there is a great college called Cal Poly nearby. We decided to go to community college for 1 1/2 years and then move to California to finish at this cool school Cal Poly. I finally had a plan!
It ended up taking me another semester but I finally moved to Santa Maria in June of 1975. One of the first things I did was go to Cal Poly. I went to the admissions office to talk to someone. On the wall was a rack full of brochures about the various programs they had. I grabbed a bunch and took a seat to look through them.
I read the one for the Mechanical Engineering program. It said that Mechanical Engineers design and build stuff like cars, airplanes, and nuclear power plants. That’s all it took. I loved building stuff and was fascinated by how things worked.
Serendipity struck once again. it turns out that because I was an out-of-state resident I got a slot that was open for the Winter quarter. I started in January 1976. For the next 2 1/2 years I became completely absorbed in learning engineering. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. I would study for hours. I drank so much coffee I would periodically hallucinate! I finally found something I was good at.
The Mechanical Engineering building was where everyone hung out. The department project was a Baja Dunebuggy that they would compete against other schools. More recently it has been solar-powered personal vehicles.
While I was going to school, the big state power supplier Pacific Gas & Electric was building a nuclear power plant at nearby Diablo Canyon.
They were up against a strong anti-nuclear crowd led by Jackson Browne! Little did my fellow student know but Cal Poly had a very small research reactor in the back of the mechanical engineering building!
I tried to get into the dorms but there were no rooms available. Instead, I rented an apartment in town for the first year and a half on Toro Road. Most of the time I had a roommate. A thirty-year-old guy who had been going to school for like 8 years. I got to know the next-door neighbor John and his girlfriend Jane. The guy downstairs was an Iranian married to a Mexican woman. He made a mean shishkabob!
Toward the end of my junior year, I got to know one of the other engineering students Steve. I heard he had a room open in a house in Los Osos for next year. After a summer working in an oil field in the central valley near Fresno, I moved in there for my senior year.
We called it the Aspen because of the road it was on. It belonged to a family friend and was close to Morro Bay. It was a very cool place to spend my last year. I got so distracted I nearly didn’t graduate!
I loved living here and always thought I would move back someday. I tried to get a job in San Diego at an interesting company General Atomics but opted to move to Seattle and go to graduate school in Nuclear Engineering. By the end of the time I was there everyone in California was fleeing the state after going to shit economically. The saying was “Don’t Californicate Washington.” Too funny!
