Somewhere on the Pacific Coast Highway, I Turned Into My Mother
From the Stella Polare Journal, June 9, 2026
What a last-minute scramble for the last room in Big Sur and Yosemite looked like, and how I would design it next time.
Big Sur & Yosemite, California
"Slow down!"
"What? I'm only going 35!"
Pitch black on Highway 1. No streetlights, no other cars, just our headlights pointing south and the certainty that somewhere off the right shoulder there is a cliff, and then the Pacific Ocean. I am digging my fingers into the leather seats of our cherry red Audi A4, and a small "aaaarrh" keeps escaping me on the curves. My boyfriend, Lorenzo, who grew up driving Italian roads, is going thirty-five miles an hour and trying hard not to laugh. That is the moment it hits me. The inevitable has happened. I have turned into my mother. We lock eyes and I start laughing too.
This was our first trip together. I've always considered myself to be adventurous but Lorenzo might have me there. I tell him I have range, and he says my range runs from four star to five star. Big Sur and Yosemite were his idea. Yosemite was a place I had only ever seen on TV or in photographs, and the Pacific Coast Highway had just re-opened after a three-year closure due to landslides. The timing was right. We booked four weeks out over Memorial Day and stayed in whatever was left. Had a wonderful time anyway.
I am a planner. Flaw or superpower, I stopped trying to decide a while ago. So when he said he had this one handled, I asked the question I ask everyone. "Do you need help planning anything? It is sort of what I do." He said he had it. And for once, I didn't research a single thing.
I had one request: book the hotels ASAP. Memorial Day weekend, four weeks out, two of the most popular parks in the country, the rooms vanish with the speed of a grey squirrel snatching some granola. We left the rest loose and we got the last room in Big Sur for our dates. It happened to be the Big Sur Lodge, which shares its entrance with Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, so we pulled off Highway 1 onto a road about one and a half cars wide, climbed up through the sequoias in the dark, and hoped someone was still at the front desk. Someone was. We got our key and collapsed.
Big Sur
We learned the rhythm of the trip on the first morning. Get up early, beat the crowds, because by mid-morning the parks fill up and the magic thins out. We drove twenty minutes south to the Ewoldsen Trail in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, five miles out and back, weaving through redwood groves and creek crossings until the trees opened and the Pacific lay flat below us. We earned that view. On the way down we passed the late risers climbing up, and we felt smug about our alarm clock.
That afternoon was a choose-your-own-adventure kind of day, Highway 1 and whatever overlook looked good. It ended at Sand Dollar Beach, down a long wooden staircase, where locals were surfing and dogs were waiting on their humans to catch one more wave. We unlaced our hiking boots, let our feet escape from our heavy socks, and buried our toes in the sand. We napped under the 70-degree sunshine, the sound of the ocean crashing a few feet away. Heaven.
Back at the Lodge, the room turned out to be the small luxury of the week. Two queen beds, a mini fridge, and a working wood-burning fireplace, plus a daily delivery of firewood, matches, and a fire starter left at the door so you can have a cozy night without thinking about it. We embraced it fully.
Dinner the first night was Fernwood Tavern, a little restaurant with a patio overlooking the Big Sur River. The food was fine. The reason to go was Coco. Coco is a large fluffy cat with white paws that look like socks, and she runs the patio from a perch on the railing. She nonchalantly loafed near a family waiting for their food to arrive so her inspection could begin. One person caved to her demanding gaze. She accepted the offering as her due and moved along to supervise the next table. It was dinner and a show.
The next morning, we were at Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, just south of Carmel, at 8:05. It opens at eight, and we took one of the last open spots in the lot. Get there early or you park along Highway 1 and walk. Point Lobos was gentle on the legs after Ewoldsen, all coves and cypress and sea lions barking somewhere out of sight. Then back to Big Sur for Pfeiffer Falls, Valley View, and across the highway for Buzzards Roost, which climbed through the redwoods to a perch above the tree line with the whole valley and the ocean at our feet. It was also, of all things, the best cell signal of the week, so we stood at the summit and sent our families a selfie.
Yosemite
Then the long drive. Four hours across central California, farmland and changing country, until you reach the Mariposa Grove and the giant sequoias. This was my first time in Yosemite, and Lorenzo, who had been before, wanted to be the one to show it to me. We stretched our legs and said hello to the Grizzly Giant, the Sentinel Tree and the other ancients, trees that have outlasted every disaster the world has thrown at them, including a 2024 fire whose scars you can still read on the bark. Magnificent is the word. They are still standing, still doing their work, and there is something steadying about that right now.
We drove on, came out of the tunnel, and there was the Valley. El Capitan on the left, Bridalveil Fall on the right, and Half Dome tucked behind. My jaw dropped. It does not look like a place that should exist. We chased the light to Olmsted Point and out to Tenaya Lake, where two German tourists beside us put their feet in the glacial water, said "nein," and stayed firmly on dry land.
Our hotel was the Yosemite View Lodge in El Portal, because four weeks out, everything inside the park was gone. We had two options and I picked this one for a single reason. It sat on the Merced River, and I thought a river might be pretty. That turned out to be the best call of the trip. They gave us a first-floor room with an extended patio that opened right onto the water. The Merced raged a few feet from the door all night, and when we shut that door and turned off the light, it dropped to a low roar, the kind that put us to sleep better than the melatonin packed in my suitcase.
I thought a river might be pretty.
That turned out to be the best call of the trip.
Then came the doozy. We were up at five, parked at Curry Village, and on the Mist Trail shortly after dawn. I knew there would be waterfalls and that I would get wet, so I had packed my rain gear. My one blessing that day was having no idea what I was in for. Blissfully unaware, I trudged up the granite staircase past Vernal Fall, soaked through yet beautiful. Over the footbridge across the Merced, then switchback after switchback, the trail turning to a rocky scramble where I was grateful for my trekking poles, until we reached the top of Nevada Fall. We had started at 4,035 feet. We were standing at 5,907. The Valley was spread out below us and I felt every one of those feet in my legs.
Then I asked Lorenzo about getting down, because my IT band had been muttering all morning. He said we would take a different route partway, to save my knees from the Mist Trail in reverse. We started down, and my IT band went from muttering to yelling to flinging profanities. At the bridge we cut onto a stretch of the John Muir Trail, quieter than the Mist Trail and somehow more spectacular. We ended up on a lookout with very few people around. Vernal Fall doing its thing below, Half Dome rising in the same frame above. While we stood there, a rainbow broke open over the falls. You can't plan that. You can only get yourself to the spot where it is allowed to happen. When it does, you feel that little sparkle in your stomach.
We came down the rest of the John Muir Trail, more switchbacks than I could count, and reached the car in one piece a few hours later than planned and my IT band screaming profanities in foreign tongues. We shut the doors just as the sky opened into a downpour. Had I still been on that trail, this would be a different story. The temperature dropped into the forties in minutes, and that was the moment I missed our Big Sur fireplace.
The last day we took it easy, since my knee was still furious. Mirror Lake early, through what the signs cheerfully label mountain lion territory, thankfully no big cats that day. Then the long drive up to Glacier Point (I was not hiking the deceptively named Four Mile Trail), when a storm caught us and turned to sleet, zero visibility, snow. I made a beeline for the visitor center and bought a beanie, which was my one souvenir from the trip. We waited it out in the car, the storm moved on, and the Valley came back in full, so we walked out to Sentinel Dome to bid farewell to Yosemite.
A perfect last afternoon.
Next time, here is my game plan
It was a wonderful week and worked for being thrown together at the last minute. With a little more lead time, here is what I would change.
In Big Sur, I would stay at the Alila Ventana Big Sur. Glamping tents through full hot-tub suites, a spa with the usual massages and facials plus Japanese onsen-style baths, and the kind of bed and gourmet dinner I want waiting for me after a hard hike. Connection with comfort, which is my whole thing. I love being in nature, and I also love letting out the dramatic sigh of relief my dog, Dillon, has perfected. Booked through me, the Alila Ventana Big Sur comes with a room upgrade, early check-in, and late check-out, all subject to availability, plus resort credits that grow the longer you stay. And I would build in a lunch at Nepenthe, perched over the ocean, the place to be in Big Sur.
What I would keep in Big Sur is Fernwood Tavern, if only for the chance of being judged by Coco. Worth the price of sharing my fish and chips.
In Yosemite, I would stay inside the park at The Ahwahnee, the grand old lodge that lets you wake to the Valley and start hiking before the parking wars begin, then come back to soak in the heated pool and have dinner without getting in the car. What I would keep is every trail and overlook we found, the rainbow over Vernal Fall, and the black bear we watched grazing in a meadow as we drove past.
Next time, Lorenzo wants to tackle the Upper Yosemite Fall Trail, 7.2 miles and 3,238 feet of climbing to the top of the tallest waterfall in North America. I am either going to train harder beforehand or send him off with a hug and "In bocca al lupo" while I stay back at The Ahwahnee.
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