The Duck Dog Swims!

LA/XC-4 DAYS EIGHTEEN, NINETEEN, TWENTY, AND TWENTY-ONE:  POSTING FROM MOUNT SHASTA, CA

Westbound mileage to L.A.: 3,602

Mileage while in L.A. area:  524

Three-day mileage from Santa Monica to Mount Shasta:  772

Total LA/XC-4 mileage:  4,898

Road Music:  Tuesday —  Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” (get it?), as I start the northward trek up Highway 1;  LA/XC-4 playlist (a mix I put together back home — including Ryan Bingham, Nikki Lane, Lorde, and many more); Mets vs. Phillies . . . and then some reverent silence on the PCH.  Wednesday — More silent worship of Highway 1; then the red-hot NY Mets vs. the Phillies again.  Thursday — Sirius cycle, then Mets vs. Marlins

Weather leaving Santa Monica Tuesday morning:  68 degrees, brilliant sunshine

Weather arriving Mount Shasta tonight:  67 degrees, beautiful

three-day state tally:  1 (California.  It’s a big freakin’ state!)

Gas money to date:  $391.07 (included being gouged for $6.50 a gallon in Gorda, near Big Sur.  Guess they know they have the PCH travelers captive.)

Seem to be having a hard time leaving California.  Meant to make it to Oregon today, but didn’t quite get there.  Have been in California for 12 days now.

You know how a lot of oldish people joke about still trying to figure out what they’ll do when they grow up?  Well, now I know what I’m gonna do.  I’m gonna be chucking balls into the ocean, and watching my duck toller bound through the

waves, grab the ball in his jaws, swim back to me, drop it at my feet, and wait for more.  This is what we did Wednesday morning — forever — at the off-leash dog beach in Morro Bay, one of the most preposterously beautiful places I’ve ever seen.  You park your car on Toro Drive, off Highway 1.  You walk along the winding  cliff path.  You scramble down the rocks to the beach.  It’s a jaw-droppingly gorgeous sight.  There’s hardly anyone there.  Your dog looks up at you, like, what are you waiting for?  You heave the ball into the ocean.  He leaps through the water and retrieves it.  Over and over and over and over again.  Maybe a billion times.

This is now my favorite thing to do in the entire world.  My other favorite thing?  Driving up the other-worldly roller

coaster of the Pacific Coast Highway.  This is the fourth time I’ve done it — on every LA/XC road trip.  I mean, some of the views are just plain . . . silly.  (Isn’t it amazing how a fine writer can always come up with just the right descriptive word?)  That’s what I did after playing ocean-waves-fetch with my duck dog.  All the way from Morro Bay to Carmel-by-the-Sea.  (Which, btw, has to be the preppiest, richest, whitest town I’ve ever laid eyes on.  And let’s not forget, I live in Westport, CT.)

And then?  On to San Francisco, where I dropped in unannounced at Stein’s, the Clement Street sports bar owned and operated by my favorite Westport ex-pats, Helmut and Michelle Steiner, and their 24 children.  Okay, just seven — but it seems like 24.  Hadn’t seen anyone in the clan for maybe 10 years, but in my hour-and-a-half visit I got to catch up with both parents, as well as Alex (Matt’s first best friend from childhood) and Phil, who I expected to still be four years old.  (He’s 28.)  Great, great time.  Great, great day.  One of the best ever.

On Wednesday morning, before leaving Morro Bay, I wrote my Westport News column on “Dog Parks Across America.”  You know, as if visiting dog parks in every town and city was the coolest thing ever for Kemba.  Now it’s, what?  Just a dog park?  All my well-traveled puppy wants since that first dive into the surf is dog beaches!!!  It all started Monday on a day trip to Huntington Beach, while we were still stationed in Santa Monica.  I’d heard a lot about the off-leash dog beach there from the regulars at Joslyn Park.  It was a totally eureka experience.  Pretty much before I could even drop my towel in the sand, Kemba was begging me to throw a deep ball into the ocean — which I did.  Without a moment’s hestiation, he plunged in after it —

so much for wondering how he’d do in swimming this spring/summer!  He joined forces with Reid, a Queensland Heeler, who, even though he was eight years old, gave my puppy a run for his money.  Reid belonged to Troy and Alana, two locals.  Troy was shooting tennis balls out of a bazooka, the kind they use to launch T-shirts into the crowd at ballgames.  Might have to get me one of those:  A few more days of flinging 7,000 balls into the water like Monday at Huntington Beach and Wednesday at Morro Bay, and I’ll need Tommy John surgery.  I already warned my family to be

ready:  At the beach in Montauk this summer, I have a feeling we’l have to take shifts, firing tennis balls out into the ocean for Kemba from dawn to dusk.

Remember how I told you that Kemba was really loving his Loews Santa Monica routine (we were there for 8 nights), and that it wasn’t going to be pretty when he realized that we’re back on the car-and-motel drill again?  Well, on Tuesday, “moving” day, he staged a sit-down strike — all but saying, “Are you kidding me, Beagle Man?!”  First, as I gathered my things, he socked himself in on our deck, overlooking the pool, and refused to move.  He just looked out longingly — the Santa Monica pier, the boardwalk, the ocean — somehow knowing that instead of this view, he’d spend his next two weeks looking at a glove box.  When I forcefully removed him from the room, he lay down in the hallway of our 7th floor room, and wouldn’t budge.  Finally got him into the car.  Three times he jumped out; each time I had to track him down with the help of the valets and bellmen.  He’d seen this coming, I know, with the Sunday and Monday day-trips — Sunday up to Santa Ynez, and Monday down California’s

Highway 1 to Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach.

Circling back to Monday, after the incredible breakthrough moment of seeing my dog swim like a fish in the rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean at Huntington Beach, we piled our sandy selves back into the Beagle-mobile and tooled down the PCH through the gleaming coastal towns (Newport Beach, Corona del Mar, et al) of Orange County to Laguna, for a visit with my friend Kristi.  While Sparky and Sophie, her two cats, babysat Kemba, we went out to dinner and live music at Mozambique, just down the block from her house.   Rocky’s Revival was the band — a sister act doing “poetic pop with a quirky vintage feel.”  Except that one of the sisters was sick, so the healthy one, a young Natalie Merchant look-alike, was accompanied by her dad.  (This was a deja vu for me:  I went to hear the Stella sisters in Nashville awhile back, but Maisy was sick, so Lennon was accompanied by her dad.)

Tuesday morning, before leaving Santa Monica, my intention was to take Kemba for one last session at Joslyn dog park, but it was closed for maintenance, so we doubled back to the somewhat undersized Pacific Ave. dog park — the one we’d originally tried last week upon arrival in town.  Picture this:  I enter through the security gates,  and a young woman with a smallish white-and-black dog says, “Is that Kemba?”  Which kind of blows my mind, because I’ve never laid eyes on this woman, or her dog, before.  Turns out that Carol had taken Kemba to Joslyn Park the day before, and had met the woman, Tanya, and her dog, Parker.  Carol and Tanya had a lot of time to talk, because Kemba and Parker were both endlessly trying to get their paws on a squirrel who’d high-tailed it up in a tree.  It’s a humbling experience to learn that your dog is better known than you are.  It’s also an indication of the amount of time Kemba spends in dog parks.

Dinner Tuesday night, after the drive up the coast to Morro Bay, was at Tognazzini’s Dockside Restaurant, one of cuter fish shanties you’re going to find.  Oysters on the half shell.  Shrimp and scallops sautee.  Reco came from Troy and Alana the day before at Huntington Beach, proving once again the value of meeting people through your dog.

This morning was breakfast at the Half Day Cafe in Kentfield, in Marin County, with Robby’s good buddy from USC, Claire, and her mom, Lisa.  Things got really festive because 1.) It was Lisa’s b-day, and 2.) Claire got a phone call during breakfast with an offer for the dream job she’d been coveting.  She came back to the table with one of the largest grins I’ve seen in my life.

For various logistical reasons, didn’t make it to Fort Funston (sorry, Teddy!  Next time!).  Instead, took Kemba to the park on the grounds of the Marin County Civic

Center in San Rafael, where I found some green space for fetch on a man-made island in the middle of a murky pond.  The first few times Kemba brought the tennis ball right back to me.  The next few times he dropped it inches from the pond.  After that, he dropped it in the pond — and then jumped in after it.  Since this was technically not an off-leash area, and since I saw not a single other dog in the pond, I hauled him out real fast — but he kept jumping back in.  Also . . . there were ducks.  So he was just trying to do his job.  I had to leash him and then locate a dog park within the grounds.  It was nothing fancy, but Kemba, being Kemba, made some good new friends — Sita and Blanca.  And I got to talk to Al and Tom.  I was already running way later than I’d anticipated, so I scrapped the idea of making it across the Oregon state line, and took the recommendation of Tom, who also travels with his dog, to stop overnight in Mount Shasta City.  I could see Mount Shasta, the second highest peak in the Cascades range, from 100 miles away down Highway 5 — and now I can see it from the window of my Best Western Plus!  Looks a little like the Matterhorn.  Kind of.

Tomorrow, a brand-new state for the Beagle Man:  Oregon!  And a brand-new travel partner, as Matt will be flying west to join the Beagle Man Tour in Portland . . .

RANDOM ROAD NOTES:

•  At a pit stop near Santa Ynez, a young Swedish couple (yes, the girl was beautiful) asked for help filling their tank.  The display screen on the pump was asking for their zip code and, of course, they didn’t have one.  You know, I’ve always wondered what foreigners do in a case like that . . .

•  Question:  Are there more gallons of water in the world’s oceans, more grains of sand in the world’s beaches, or more hairpin turns on the Pacific Coast Highway up around Big Sur?

•  Always a good idea to stop if the light’s turning red when the person ahead of you stops — especially if you’re going downhill in San Francisco

•  By traveling in April instead of September, I may miss out on listening to those football Sundays I always enjoyed — but I get to listen to the first-place Mets every day!

I PLAN TO POST AS CLOSE TO DAILY AS POSSIBLE WHILE KEMBA AND I ARE ON THE ROAD.  BUT YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY:  MAN PLANS, GOD LAUGHS.    OH, AND BTW, YOU CAN ALSO FOLLOW ME ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM.