Saket Vora

A note for anyone wanting to drive from Raleigh to Palo Alto — you can do it very comfortably in four days, three nights. You will spend nights in Little Rock, AR; Amarillo, TX; Kingman, AZ, drive no more than 10-12 hours a day. Since we allocated five days, we have decided to make a detour to the Pacific Coast Highway — Route 1 — see drive along a road far more scenic than I-5.

Unlike the rest of the states we have driven through, California is persistent in showing its penchant for contrast in its land. Bare mountains are clumped about the horizon but occasionally come near the road. The grassy plains are a bleached tan color, and the numerous short trees that dot the landsacpe make this choice of ground cover even more odd, especially for one coming from the East coast, where the ground is painted from a palette of greens and browns.

Multiple runs of ugly, crude transmission line towers stand tall amidst the haze that smudges the view of the coastal mountain range on our left. From the road, squares of green farms or fruit trees come into sight, sometimes replaced by enormous dredging machinery or mining facilities. At one point we take CA-46 and head west again towards the coast. Vineyards start to appear. In one especially bizarre stretch, we had an almond tree grove to our right for 2 minutes, then the neatly ordered rows of a vineyard to our left for 3 minutes, chaparral scrub on both sides for 1 minute, immediately followed by nearly a hundred bobbing oil pumps scattered around both sides of the road for 3 minutes. Very strange indeed.

King City is a fairly small town, but we found a nice pizza place for dinner and a hotel run by an Indian — who we converse with in Gujurati now.  

Tomorrow we will drive along the coast, to Big Sur, then Carmel Highlands, Monterey Bay, until finally pushing to Palo Alto.

We got in touch with my nephew Saumil (who is actually 2 years older than me) and will meet him on Sunday. He recently graduated from Stanford too. I’m looking forward to that.

Edit: I just realized something. When I look at a map, there are 6 or 7 major lateral routes across America - the interstate highways 10, 20, 40, 70, 80, 90, and partially 94. (I-90 goes down across South Dakota while I-94 goes up across North Dakota and Minnesota, and I-20 meets up with 10 near El Paso, so that’s a half-route too).

I’ve driven cross country on 2/3 of them — the 10, 40, 70, and 90. Pretty well spaced ‘cross sections’ of America.