On The Road in Northern California

We left San Francisco the morning after the Super Bowl. For the last few days the city has been heaving with football fans, a sea of people in jerseys from across the US have come all this way to pack out Downtown bars and North Beach saloons.

The traffic thinned out once we’d crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito. We’re heading out of town on a road trip, that beautiful American mythology. Almost as American as the Super Bowl. The Open Road. The rugged California coast. Country music fading in and out along the frequencies of the radio.

We pick up Spencer Wells, filmmaker and photographer, and stylist Sarah Coggins at a breakfast spot in Marin, where they live. We plot out a path over pancakes and coffee, poring over maps, tracing a route with our fingers through Northern California, from diners to dive bars, through grand national parks and small hippy towns.

Spencer leads the way up Mount Tamalpais to Bolinas we head through pristine countryside and deep into the freshest air, Freebird on repeat on the twisting road up and the twisting road down, playing back the solo again and again and again.

Bolinas is hippy country, home to poets and painters. The Haight had drawn people in decades ago and then spat them back out up here in search of space and peace and quiet. It feels like every town we pass through has a little shrine to Jerry Garcia tucked away on a backstreet.

Then we’re down Tamales Bay towards Hog Island, jutting out over the water, there are mountains of oysters to be consumed in the sunshine, watching herons and cormorants on the water. After lunch we head inland to Casino, a little bar in a little town with little else. It’s the platonic ideal of a bar you’d find on a road trip, pool and PBRs and hunting trophies on the wall, night falls and Bob Dylan is on the jukebox.

The road to Monte Rio spools out along the Bohemian Highway, we drive in the pitch dark, our headlights the only illumination. It’s good to get lost, to get off the beaten track. At the local restaurant we order a round of Cosmopolitans and American sized burgers, while a band plays wild cover versions of California Classics to a few elderly patrons who are dancing on thick red carpet under flickering lights.

We have another round of Cosmo’s, and another, at the only bar still open in town, and we wake up in the morning, the rest of the night an enjoyable blur.

The mornings here are thick with fog, the tops of giant redwoods obscured in the mist. There are warning signs about local mountain lions. The air is verdant and the trees are thousands of years old and the perfect antidote to too much fun last night.

There are two kinds of shops around here: one sells hippy offcuts, tie dye trousers, Grateful Dead merch, heavy incense, ancient sunbleached New Age cassettes of meditation music, books about psychedelic mushrooms, plant magic, and the great cosmic mother. Others sell real workwear for the loggers and farmers, people with jobs to do.

After breakfast we follow the Russian River out towards the sea. At a little cafe a waiter brings out plates of crab sandwiches and clam chowder for us, a strong cup of tea, the sound of waves gently calming.

We stop in an even smaller town, just a gas station and bar and a spooky church, before heading back down the Highway 1 towards the city. The weather turns on our way home. Huge waves batter and storm against the coastline, night’s fallen by the time we reach the 2am Club, a little bar in Marin, Spencer’s favourite, for a few final games of pool, a final round of Miller High Lifes, and then we’re back over the Golden Gate Bridge, the city illuminated through the fog.