For: People who like driving, and not in the city
Scenery: All kinds
Time spent: A couple days
Visiting season: Winter
Great for: Getting lost
I’ve been having a great time going around the SoCal area recently, seeing some really cool stuff, so I thought I might share. Winter is a great time to visit since SoCal usually doesn’t get that much rain, and temperatures are much milder than in the summer. Have to be careful of snow and washed out roads on some of the mountain passes though.
Going down to Barstow originally for Lenwood outlets, but I remembered there is a Route 66 museum and they were open, so I dropped by to take a look.
After looking around, I decided to drive down Route 66 to Victorville for lunch. On the way there, you run across a couple little community by the name of Helendale and Silver Lakes. I thought Silver Lakes was one of those stupid names where it was completely non-descriptive of the town, since it was in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Incredible how wrong I was…boy it’s a beautiful oasis in the middle of nowhere.
On a separate trip, I went down to Woodland Hills for Supercar Sunday. Since Supercar Sunday starts at 7am and ends before most people wake up, I decided to make it an even better day and go auto-touring. Always wanted to see Port Hueneme and Channel Island…but they didn’t turn out to be that interesting.
So I headed over to UCSB after having a breakfast in downtown Santa Barbara. It’s one hell of a nice campus I admit.
If you look on the map, Solvang is only an inch away! It’s a whole town with Danish architecture, even the houses. So I trekked there hoping to get some pastries, but they all looked ordinary to me so I passed. Can’t believe I drove so far for nothing, and neither can my coworker.
On the way back, I took the scenic route going over the coastal hills. After all, nothing to see on 101 that I haven’t seen already. 154 over Lake Cachuma and San Marcos is a pretty nice drive, but full of traffic for some reason. This was taken on a very steep side road.
Then decided that taking 14 or 5 back up wouldn’t cut it. So I took 33 north of 101, went up into Ojai, keep going north and cut east on Lockwood Valley Rd towards Grapevine. This is just over Pine Mountain Summit on Lockwood, it’s a beautiful place but the road gets very hairy as it’s up there in the mountains. There were multiple washed out sections and flooded rivers that were a couple hundred feet long…shallow but hairy nonetheless, especially because they tend to surprise you after you crest a hill at speed, and there’s absolutely no traction to slow down in time, so you just hang on. An amazing section of road with no traffic that I would recommend only in the summer after a long dry spell.
