Santa Monica to Cambria
So my journey begins on the part of California 1 on Santa Monica beach. Let’s get an overview of the purpose of trip. Two years ago I fell in love with the road here in California. It provided amazing landscapes and driving opportunity that made me want to make this. My dream is to eventually photograph/ document various coastlines along the Pacific Ocean.
The Pacific Coast Highway is a an All-American Road, the other one is Route 66. Highway 1 shares it with the US 101 and even Interstate 5 at some points. But the most beautiful parts of California 1 is part where I’m driving tomorrow, the area between Big Sur and Monterey.
But for today, it’s from Santa Monica to Cambria.
With gas prices at an al time high, hybrid cars were nowhere to be found at the Hertz rental. I was shocked that they offered a Hyundai as a replacement. I know it’s a great car and great gas mileage. But seriously?!?. So I went for the Mazda RX-3 sedan version. My friend had this car and it was awesome and so was this one. Very sporty and even has a manual transmission option should I want it. Yes please.
Cameras used for this are the Sony NEX C3, Panasonic Lumix LX-5 and a Nikon D200. Mounting them was a challenge. The focal length of the Sony was a bit short plus all the shaking in car with the roads meant that most of my footage from day 1 is useless. Salvageable but it will take a lot of work.
Lumix video was great but ran out of batteries. I do have an audio recording of the whole thing so that’s good. As for the D200, I’l need to make a few adjustments today to get better images but the system is working as I had hoped.
The trip took me roughly four hours and it was long. Most of it on the US101 to get better time as the sun was setting and night driving will make shooting difficult.
Getting out of Southern California is easier said than done. For some reason the 405 was not moving. Good thing I decided to start from Santa Monica. This allowed me to bypass that area completely and take the PCH up to Malibu, hand a right at Pepperdine University and hit the 101 from there.
The weather was great so everyone was out at the beach. Which meant traffic.
The Malibu canyons gave a great opportunity to get a feel for the car with it’s twists and turns and I was happy. The rental reminds me of my own car back home.
I had been running on coffee with my “jetlag” from New York the whole day and things were getting dicey at around Santa Maria, a good 1 1/2 hours from Cambria. Gas mileage wasn’t so good. I stopped for gas in San Luis Obispo and filled up 7.5 gallons.
It was well into the night once I got to the inn in Cambria where I would spend the night to recharge and prepare for the next day.
Procrastinating in the Heat 