Driving the Pacific Coast Highway Alone

I left San Francisco with a full tank and no real plan for where I’d sleep past the first night. The road does the planning for you anyway, curve by curve, and there is nowhere to be except exactly where the car is pointed.

Alone in a car for eleven hundred miles, I ran out of things to be anxious about somewhere around Big Sur.

People ask if it was scary, going alone. Mostly it was just quiet, in a way that took the first day to stop mistaking for loneliness.

By the time I reached the redwoods I’d stopped narrating the trip in my head for an imagined audience. It became just mine, which was the entire reason I’d wanted to do it alone in the first place.