I arrived at California’s San Simeon State Park on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 12, after a brief stay in the southernmost part of Sequoia National Forest, which, as far as I could see, had no sequoia trees (generally they are hard to miss). They must be farther north.
San Simeon SP is about 225 miles up the coast from LA, and about the same distance south of San Francisco. The park is set maybe half a mile from the pacific, and as I sit outside at night and when I go to bed, I can hear the huge waves thundering against the shore. If there’s a more perfect white noise lullaby, I’ve not heard it. And I will say that by the time I arrived here I was frustrated with a few things, from the helluva long drive to some heightened anxiety that’s been hounding me for the past few weeks. And that anxiety just evaporated on that first night here, crashed down with the waves and rolled back into the sea, which can keep it. It’s peaceful here, and the ocean, especially the pacific (she was my first ocean), has always felt like some kind of deep, unimaginable magic to me.
This park’s full name is Hearst San Simeon, and about five miles up the road is the famed Hearst Castle, the former home of the newspaper magnate who competed with Joseph Pulitzer and gave rise to an empire that still exists today, with some 200 magazines and newspapers under its umbrella.
I popped into a bar on Sunday night here and chatted up a grizzled looking guy next to me who turned out to be a tour guide at the castle. He was wearing gloves with the fingers cut off (badass) and drinking whiskey on the rocks, just starting day one of three days off. He had a list going in a little notebook, tasks that he wanted to accomplish, like doing laundry, which wasn’t an easy proposition since he lived in a van alongside the highway, moving it from various designated “safe” parking areas where truckers and other travelers can pull over and get some shuteye.
He was probably in his late 50s and had been working at the castle for about a year, he said, living in a van because it’s too expensive to live anywhere nearby on what he makes. There’s a small, picturesque seaside town called Cambria about three miles from here that reminds me of the southwestern coast of Italy. Adorable little shops everywhere and homes stacked up the hillsides so each has a coveted view of the ocean. But most of the houses around here start at north of $700,000, and those are the ones that need work and don’t have a view. A front row seat, 2,000 square foot home will set you back about $1.8 million.
Many of these homes, as you might imagine, are owned by wealthy people as second homes, and if that’s not the case they’re homes that have been in the family and have been passed down. I ducked into a cute little shop in Cambria that caught my eye with some stone artwork and other trinkets and the woman working said that her father had built the home she now lives in over 40 years ago for $16,000. Her mother and father were both teachers, and she was too, until she got sick of “those little 7th and 8th grade brats,” so now she works as a cashier at the shop. Her home is worth $1.5 million, she says, but she’s not ever selling.
I can’t recall how I chose San Simeon, but I rarely do much research before heading to a place. My go-to method is to pull up Google Maps, zoom in to roughly where I want to be, and then look for state or national park campgrounds or national forests. For me, travel is about the unexpected, and so I don’t necessarily seek out social media tips or even want to know everything about a place before I arrive. I want to see it with my eyes before someone tells me how to see it, and if I miss something I hear about later that half the internet says I should have seen, it wouldn’t be the first time and it won’t be the last.
In any case, I’m not sure if you could go wrong with any campground along the California coast, but I definitely feel like I’ve gone right with this one. There’s no electricity, but there are hot showers, flush toilets, and water, and since I’ve got solar on the roof and the sun has so far blazed every day, my batteries have topped off each day at 100% since I arrived (I have enough juice stored to weather about 2 work days of rain/clouds).
Sunday I’ll move about 25 miles south to Morro Bay State Park where I’ll stay for 10 days, and then I’ll move another 10 miles south to Montana De Oro State Park, before heading north to Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, which should be about a 50 mile drive, but because the highway is still collapsed from landslides a couple years ago, a detour will take me a roundabout way of about 175 miles.
It’s funny, but when I travel I become a much chattier person. No one is around who knows me, and so the shy, socially awkward me, which is how I have long viewed myself, doesn’t have to play that role anymore. I can instead be a new person, or not a new person exactly, but I can take the inward me—a person who is naturally curious about people and places and things, and direct that person to come and start living a little more loudly on the outside. I’m not fundamentally different, but I’m freer to change the story of who I tell myself I am in a way that doesn’t come as easily to me when I’m in my typical setting. I think I just wrote about this the other day, in fact, but I’ve noticed that subtle changes come over me when I’m traveling. In short, I become more brave when I travel. My brain gets way more ideas too.
The other day I was reading a profile of the lovable travel writer—the man with two first names, Rick Steves—and he said, “To me, there are two kinds of travel: There’s escape travel, and there’s reality travel. I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet.”
The writer of the piece, too, reflected on her own travels from when she was young and backpacked alone across Europe, to today, when she says “I choose a destination that doesn’t ask too much of me and to which I don’t give much back. Instead of traveling to discover, I travel to retreat.”
I get that. If you work year round, when you finally have a little time to travel, you just want to tune out, to disappear from your day-to-day reality for a while. Those trips are necessary and often the only option for most of us. Which is why I’m so grateful to be able to do this kind of travel—extended travel where I’m working remotely and living my regular life in unfamiliar places.
Anyway, give that story a read. One thing Steves said which I’ve found to be true over and over again in my life is that “The most frightened people are the people who have never traveled, whose worldview is shaped by commercial news media. And the people that are not afraid are the people who have been out there.”
I don’t know where I fall on that scale. I am often an anxiety ridden person, frightened of many things, but curiosity has ultimately proven the stronger force. And each time you experience the wonders of travel, the successes of discovery, it’s a vote of confidence and you can bring it back with you, moving your glowing inward self out into the world little by little, where others can rightfully enjoy you, and you them.
PS: When I sat down to write tonight I meant to write about passing through Sedona, AZ, which was a first for me. So I’m not sure how that didn’t happen here. But that’s coming. Also I saw elephant seals tonight, just a few miles up the road. They are very fat. Every day I don’t write, I fall further behind in what I need to write about.
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