It's the Journey I find so troubling.........

Since 1992, Jeanette and I have gone at least once a year to Santa Barbara. Some years three and four times. That trip almost always includes a meal at Andersen's Danish Bakery and Café on State Street, Jeanette always goes to Tienda Ho, and stocks up on all those clothing pieces from around the world.  I always go to California's oldest used bookstore, the Book Den , where old scholarly tomes on the history of California tempt me and often do make the assault on my pocketbook. In years past the Journey included a trip to  State and A Café, who blew away in the wind one day and the best bookstore to have ever existed in California, Earthling Books, who were a fantastic local chain run out by Borders and Barnes and Noble who each discovered that price cutting and lack of service may destroy the competition, but they also destroy you. A situation where California lost and no one won.

They say the important thing about travel, even 102 miles, is not the destination, food, coffee, clothing, books or different location, but the Journey. I often think of history, how this journey was made in 1779, 1880, 1910, 1930, 1960, 1980 and today. The journey for a long time during my lifetime was stable. There were only very slight changes over time. Leaving Altadena,the road was crowded, full of dense development, and then was the glorious moment when one crested the hill at Camarillo and suddenly one looked upon miles of miles of cultivated green fields. A psychological moment of bliss, a sensation of comfort, of coming home to the better parts of the old California would roll into your soul like a tulle fog...

It is no longer so.

Crest the hill and look onto hyper dense miles of condominiums and insta ersatz villages. Places like everywhere, rooted not exactly in anywhere.  California lost, none of us won. Food will now arrive by Jet from Chile and Argentina. Who wins on that one?

For Generations, one of the most cherished roadside views in California has been the view opposite  xxxxxxxxxx where the waves breaking within a long circular arc of shore please the soul. During the last two years the road has had construction going on. One hoped for say, a repaired highway. Nope. A Bicycleway, ridden literally by no one today when I traveled in either direction, whose miles of iron fence on both sides of the two cycle lanes totally obscures that treasured view for the millions of motorists who once beheld it and now drive on a completely hideous cobbled roadbed of multiple kinds of paving textures and heights. REALLY? No cyclists are using it and no number could ever use it to justify either the cost or the destruction to the highway to build it. No one won on that one, except the union contractors.

As one gets closer to Santa Barbara the once famous Mira Mar Hotel has met the bulldozer. This was considered the finest hotel in the area. It was bought by out of state "Investors" who not knowing anything about the California building permit process, closed it to restore and remodel it. Midway through the job the adopted code changed, This resulted in massive cost over runs on an empty project, arguments with all the agencies, a hotel that sat empty for years and finally is now an empty lot whose owners are in the decade long process of Revisions and if not legal, moral bribes needed for Coastal Commission and County approvals. No one but government staff will ever win on that one.

Everywhere we drove, where fields that once supplied the most desired, highest quality fruit, vegetables and flowers to Southern California and the world, have become a memory. In their place more hyper dense and amazingly ugly. in spite of efforts to glue historical details on them. Again they are rooted to nowhere and untruthful to the designs applied to them. Large groups of twelve unit condos with applied fake "Craftsman", "Spanish" "Cowboy" "Cape Cod" details are untruthful to this time and untruthful to the time they pretend to honor.

Once you land in Santa Barbara, there is enough money to prevent these eyesores, but uniformly so much money that no one working in Santa Barbara can live any longer in Santa Barbara. My server at breakfast has a 56 mile round trip to work. She says she can't pay her rent on what she can make on tips in Ventura, so she drives to Santa Barbara where she can never make enough tips to live. Who wins on that one? Not the People of California.

This is why the journey to my demi vacation is so jarring. As I speed along at Seventy on highways of uneven, lifted and sunken plates of paving each also potholed, I can not help but see the State of California is being quickly, thoughtlessly, permanently deprived of it's most vital and important industry, food production. The towns that replace the fields of plenty are unsustainable, poorly designed and an insult to California's past, present and future. Someone may be winning out of all this, I can not say, but the people and the planet are being impoverished.