We ate breakfast at Denny's, then we were back in the car again.
At the time, I was a member of the Socialist Labor Party, and I was going to visit their national headquarters in Palo Alto, California while I was there. However, we were unable to find it even with directions, and no one was answering the phone, so we decided to just press on and leave Palo Alto behind. U.S. Route 101 was beginning to feel like a familiar friend.
43 miles (69 km) later, we arrived in Gilroy, famous for its garlic crop and annual Gilroy Garlic Festival. The sun was just coming up over the valley. The car windows were down, allowing in some fresh air, and something more. The heavenly fragrance of garlic was wafting in the air. Not a heavy or unpleasant odor, but instead what one might associate with a gourmet meal seasoned just so with Allium sativum or a warm garlic bagel. If you're a garlic lover as we were, then it's a smell that could carry you away on wings of olfactory pleasure.
Gilroy is where we finally left U.S. Route 101 behind, taking State Route 152 43 miles (69 km) east to join up with Interstate 5 for the first time since we'd abandoned it in Olympia, Washington.
It was 274 miles (441 km) to Los Angeles, California. We saw flat agricultural land, monotonous to the eye, but as we approached Los Angeles, we began to experience going up a hill, coming down the other side, and then seeing yet another hill in our path. It was a long, unmemorable drive. We stopped for lunch along the way.
My maternal grandfather Neal Eldred Crawford followed a similar path on old Highway 99 in the 1950s when he was a truck driver for Los Angeles-Seattle Motor Express, making a weekly trip to southern California and back to Seattle. I was aware of following in his footsteps in a way.
As we entered the San Fernando Valley, the traffic began to pick up. As we got closer to the city, we had the pleasure of experiencing afternoon rush hour in Los Angeles, surely among the many circles of Hell. Bumper-to-bumper at a snail's pace, with lines of traffic behind us and in front of us reaching seemingly to infinity, we thought we'd never arrive at our destination. The freeway was also under construction, with a ridged road surface, and this only added to the misery.
The very first thing we saw when we exited the freeway in Los Angeles proper was police cars with flashing lights, several police officers with guns drawn, and a male suspect down on his knees. The trunk of the man's car was open, so we assumed that he'd been caught with some contraband. That was a memorable introduction to the largest city we'd ever been to.
We had reservations at the Metro Plaza Hotel, located near Chinatown. It was then a new hotel, having only opened a few months earlier, and it was our first experience with using keycard locks. It made us feel a bit like the stereotypical country bumpkins who had found themselves among city slickers and their newfangled ways for the first time.
After settling in, we walked to a nearby Chinese restaurant for dinner, observing graffiti on the walls along the way. To our initial dismay, the restaurant served authentic Chinese cuisine, not the American Chinese food we were used to, and the menu was written entirely in Chinese.
Tired, hungry, and unwilling to be daunted by a little culture clash, we were able to convey the kind of dishes we were familiar with, and the waitress brought out the closest equivalents (some of which weren't really that close). It was an interesting experience, but our stomachs were full.
Total Travel Distance: 360 miles (579 km)
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