A road trip around California? Sounds great. But what if one of you uses a wheelchair, asks ELGY GILLESPIE
PUT NEWCOMERS to California down in San Francisco or Los Angeles, San Diego or San Jose and they immediately gravitate towards the surfer-and-seal-dotted Left Coast beaches. But a road trip around California in a wheelchair? There's nothing to stop you.
Long and skinny, with wineries and hot springs everywhere, California is made for car trips. It's the gold standard for on-the-road adventures, and Highway 1 is its nirvana. Thirty minutes south of San Francisco, it's surprisingly empty, too. Highway 1 was especially empty last summer when Santa Ana winds and flash fires forced even the condors at Ventana reserve to evacuate.
By the time my brother Richie, his son Jeff, their iPods and I began our road trip the condors were back, if hidden in smoke. Homemade signs thanking brave firefighters punctuated the roadside.
My 20-year-old nephew, aka JJ, arrived here in his wheelchair, his Indiana Jones fedora on a trademark Bob Dylan 'fro. Heavy-metal Fender-doting dad Richie was behind. Off we set to road test all the fires, ramps, rails, elevators and grab bars of the Golden State.
First I tackled my Honda Civic with a neighbour and room-mate. We flattened seats, attached a bike rack to the hatch and attached the wheelchair with bungee cord: voilà!
Truth to tell, JJ can walk with sticks, but he's wobbly – cerebral palsy – and he remains in danger as he manoeuvres into my front seat because of my steep hill and his urge to challenge my slipping hand brake.
Prudently, we first tried a run to the top of Mount Tam, in Golden Gate National Recreation Park. We stayed at West Point Inn, a 104-year-old hiking hostel where you cook for yourself and there's no electricity. Normally you hike up, but our disabled sticker got us all the way up its twisty fire road. We shared the rustic Honeymoon Dodge cabin, built in 1918 by Titanic survivor Hamilton Dodge, who found his life as a survivor intolerable and craved this retreat. It has the finest view, is accessible by ramp and has a disabled-access cabin with giant bathroom next door.
Thanks to this adventure, we decided my Honda was simply too bijou, so trawled car-hire places, toting our GPS. We wound up with a white jeep resembling a hotel-sized fridge. Relieved, we tossed in Richie and JJ's toys. It felt like steering a magic carpet around a theme park, uncannily like Disney's California Soarin' even (see the panel on the next page).
I checked the list: money, cards, bookings, keys, medication, passports, swimsuits, sunscreen, shades, hats – and chargers, transformers, connectors, iPods, cameras, cables, CDs, cords, plus chair, walker and sticks. Dammit, we're jammed again.
By noon we'd recovered from our daily quarrel with the GPS and were driving south via Pacifica to Highway 1, past pumpkin fields, hang-gliders, surfers and fishermen at Half Moon Bay and Pescadero, and on through summer fog to hippy Santa Cruz. Stopping for lunch outside Moss Landing, we eavesdropped on Hell's Angels bikers talking about the fire. GPS notwithstanding, we found Monterey EconoLodge. Despite the geraniums it was grey and dismal, if only $98 for three.
Another senior GPS moment later, we arrived at Monterey Bay Aquarium, on John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. A tourist Mecca of Bubba Gump Shrimp bistros and perfumed candles, it's the perfect family outing. Partly volunteer-run, it earns its reputation as the world's greatest aquarium (Baltimore's and Boston's run it close) with open-sea tide pools, wraparound tanks and hands-on starfish.
The aquarium offers wheelchairs, customised elevators and directions to a giant squid whose suckers try to inhale spectators through plate glass. The first lift whisked us up a central glass column where sea otters Tula and Seva were lazily fondling clam shells in their chest hair. Next the skywalk whisked us to a vast bar where hammerheads, giant tuna, barracuda and leopard sharks stared at us in frank curiosity – one naughty shark ate another last year in front of sobbing toddlers.
Heading south past ultra-wealthy Pebble Beach and Carmel to Big Sur, we skirted curiously untamed wilderness where condors nested above ancient redwoods and the emptiest beaches in the world.
This is where Highway 1 becomes the California of car ads, a winding journey in your imagination whenever you channel biker movies, Clint Eastwood's Play Misty For Me or Hitchcock's Vertigo. Because of smoke we missed the Henry Miller Library; too bad, because it has a cute Swedish curator who dresses up as the Pope.
We'd booked a special-needs tour at San Simeon's Hearst Castle, where guide Scott Steck and driver Lauralinda met us in a customised minibus with hydraulic lift for chairs. Lauralinda, blond bombshell of a granny, drove us to the back entrance of the "summer home" that the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst began building for himself in 1919.
Hearst and his mistress, the starlet Marion Davies, were the Donald Trump and Marla of their day. They entertained the likes of Winston Churchill and the royalty of Hollywood and Europe.
A tour of Hearst's pet addiction is a chance to see what happens if you have so much money you can't stop building. San Francisco's leading proponent of the arts-and-crafts style, the architect Julia Morgan, toiled on the castle endlessly, using real gold and tiles and antiques from palaces and monasteries that Hearst shipped back from Spain and Italy, fashioning them into turrets and breathtaking swimming pools.
At a kitchen door Scott unloaded us past Depression-era refrigerators, medieval French tapestries and exquisite porcelain. We tagged on to comic William Hopping's tour, agog at his accounts of Harpo, Harlow and Cary Grant crooning along with Hoagie Carmichael in the drawing room. Dining chairs were fashioned from medieval choir stalls. Menus were lavish, but napkins were paper and rules were strict. "And the wine," complained David Niven, "flowed like molasses."
A kilometre or so south is the turn-off to Paso Robles, an old Hispanic spa I took a fancy to while retracing Marilyn Monroe's honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio.
When the film Sideways came out the fledgling Paso Robles wine industry soared overnight on jammy Zinfandels and Pinots to become the Central Coast's wine capital.
Built on hot springs, Paso was once famed as halfway point between San Francisco and Los Angeles, where people recuperated en route with a steak, a cocktail and a soak.
In 1953 Monroe and DiMaggio fled here from the paparazzi after a city-hall marriage. Their motel has been taken over by pensioners – folksy tributes remain. The wall where James Dean crashed his car is not far away.
The American Automobile Association booked us into the Paso Robles Inn, Spanish colonial-style and interesting. Here we met a glitch: it hadn't booked a ground-floor room. There was minor palaver and all was forgiven when we saw the apology suite: two huge rooms with king-size beds, a patio with family-sized hot tub and giant TVs.
Hot springs and wine tasting beckoned. We tried out Sycamore Springs in Avila, where we asked for the no-stairs hot tub. One near-accessible tub existed, so we snagged it, plus a bottle of local Wild Horse Old Vine Zin. All around us, screened by trees, we heard giggles and murmurs. Getting into the tub among the trees turned out to be doable for us all, just about.
I read Oliver Sacks to my boys while we soaked amid faint grassy scents and sank mortal Zin. All in all, truly Californian – until it was time for us to leave.
If getting Jeff and us into the hot tub had been iffy, getting out was impossible. JJ loved the hot tub, loved it more than his iPod, and kept falling back in, dragging us, too. Several times we all fell back in, giggling uncontrollably.
Next door was Avila Beach, on California's Central Coast, where the nearby waves are warm enough to swim in all year round sans wetsuit, electric carts are on hire for wheelchair-users, great family camping exists, and elephant seals congregate in noisy, belligerent stag parties.
The inn's circular diner is a 1950s relic with matching menu. Three huge plates of waffles and pancakes later we zipped south past the charming college town of San Luis Obispo, the pseudo-Danish village of Solvang and Anderson's pea-soup factory, and ran into Santa Barbara to check on my old Trinity College buddy Mashey Bernstein, who runs local film festivals and teaches at UCSB.
On Mashey's advice we avoided Highways 101 and 405. So we took a gentle saunter down H-1 all the way to Venice Beach, where we were instantly swallowed by a riotous boardwalk of skateboarders, bikers, skaters, volleyballers, surfers and windsurfers, cafes and music.
Ah, Venice Beach! The least ugly side of ugly Los Angeles! We found another EconoLodge double for $98, though once again they'd forgotten JJ's chair and stuck us next to a rowdy laundry.
We sashayed out to fun food at the Terrace, run by a voluble Ukrainian who whisked us off the terrace and relegated us to the rear.
Jeff is a huge movie buff. Well, duh! Sacrificing Disney Concert Hall (Frank Gehry at his most, er, Gehry), art museums, the Hollywood sign and Grauman's Chinese Theatre, we hung out at Universal Studios on our travelling buddy Lynn Ferrin's advice.
Okay: so it's corny, hokey and pricey, but it was value for us, because they took one look at our chair, dished out passes, sped us to the front of every line, supplied bus transport, helped us on to trams first and generally gave us the time of our lives.
The best part about this was meeting other wheelies, particularly Rob de Marco, a Bostonian paraplegic activist who chatted to Jeff and talked about mixing in college, dating problems and getting special-ed help at home in Boston. It costs him $30,000 (€24,000) a year to attend college.
Jeff snorted from his nose every time Rob made him laugh, and Rob cried "Dude, you totally snorfed!" He's writing a movie about the loves of a wheelchair boy in Hollywood.
Rob's activist mum, Rita, complained mightily about hotels in nearby Torrance, where the doors were too narrow for his chair, and forced them to move to a dump near an oil refinery. "Blackwater executives everywhere," grunted Rob's mum darkly.
The Universal Studio train tour takes in Bates Motel, King Kong, Wisteria Lane, Jaws, The Mummy, and Bruce and Evan Almighty, but Earthquake was Jeff's favourite. Our Oscar goes to the Simpsons ride: a Krusty Land of special effects and shuddering cars, with imaginative wait-line views and mini-cartoons.
Cruising back around Beverly Hills, Laurel Canyon and Santa Monica to check out movie locales and stars' houses, we chanced on Cafe Panini, an improv comedy store run by Momo from Morocco. His patter was shaky, but his mime and music made up. The wannabe comedians roped Jeff into their acts and made him their sidekick. Okay, they sucked, but JJ adored every minute, and his laugh kept them going all night.
Next day we hit Highway 405 and regretted it instantly, yet stumbled on a sweetly funky Scottish brunch hangout called John O'Groats diner. We downed salmon hash and Huevos O'Groats. Pure luck! I continued to quarrel with the GPS, but it got us around Los Angeles, I confess.
We could easily have died on 405, possibly in the year 2048, but GPS got us to the cactuses: Highways 10 and 395, the Mojave and some of the loveliest driving in the state. This is where you have to opt for Las Vegas or drive like gangbusters to Yosemite. The GPS wanted us to short-cut via I-5, which we did, and ouch! Luckily, our jeep was big enough to fend off giant monster trucks – my poor wee Honda would have fainted.
At El Portal, on H-140 near Yosemite, a biking enthusiast from Youghal, Co Cork, called Carolyn McGrath runs an international youth hostel with her partner, Doug Shaw. At their Yosemite Bug they offer dorm bunks, tents, cabins, swimming hole, rafting river, fat-tire biking, a shuttle bus to Yosemite Valley, a clubby dining room and stuff for kids: perfect for a day or even a week.
I've stayed at the Bug often: in my tent, in their tent, in the dormitory, in a tent cabin, in summer or winter; it's comfier every time. Now they have a spa and cabins, too. This time they stunned us with a disabled- access cabin plus attached wet-room shower and grab bars.
The food at the Bug is on a roll: lamb shanks with plum sauce blew us away for $14 apiece, and we're in no position to complain about their wine list.
We wanted Yosemite to be the crowning glory of our road trip, but aside from the reliable Bug it wasn't. That's our fault. When we took JJ up to Glacier Peak we thought for some reason we'd be driving past view after view. We did, but then we left the chair in the car and handed him his sticks; dumb of us, eh?
Uneven rocks and loose scree, 300m drops to the valley floor and pushy crowds with noisy kids made all the lookouts very challenging. Although views are wherever you look and we even saw a bear cub, it made JJ unsteady and gave him vertigo of the Hitchcockian sort. Let's say it would have been better with the chair and even then not much fun for JJ.
When we got home we encountered French friends who were just setting out. We marked their card. We told them they'd want to do everything we did but wouldn't have as much fun. We told them they'd be wise to bring a wheelchair.
Go there
Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus. com) flies to San Francisco from Dublin and Shannon. You can continue with its partner JetBlue to Long Beach, Burbank, San Diego and San Jose. You can also book packages at www.americanholidays.ie and www.touramerica.ie.
Disability passes
Download an application for a $10 (€8) disabled placard from California Department of Motor Vehicles website (http://dmv.ca.gov) and bring it with your disabled person's parking card, ID and licence to 1377 Fell Street, in the Western Addition, San Francisco (800-7770133).
Theme parks
Universal Studios. Universal City, www.universalstudios hollywood.com. They took one look at JJ's chair, dished out passes, sped us to the front of every line, supplied bus transport, helped us on to trams first and generally gave us the time of our lives. For a guide to disabled access, see www.universalstudios hollywood.com/pdf/guest_ assistance_chart.pdf.
Disneyland. 1313 South Harbor Boulevard, Anaheim, 00-1-714-7814000, http://disneyland.disney.go.com. A pioneer in accessibility for people with disabilities; has wheelchairs to loan. To see which rides have disabled access, go to http://disneyland. disney.go.com/disneyland/ en_US/help/gsDetail?name= MobilityDisabilityGSDetailPage#DCA0.
Golden Gate
West Point Inn. 1000 Panoramic Highway, Mill Valley, 00-1-415-3889955, www.westpointinn.com. Check online for disabled-access cabins built by Washington Dodge in 1918; rooms and other cabins are less accessible.
Monterey
EconoLodge Monterey. 2042 North Fremont Street, 00-1-831-3725851, www.econolodge.com. Good basic accommodation; $99 (€80) for three with breakfast.
Monterey Bay Aquarium. 886 Cannery Row, 00-1-831- 6484800, www.mbayaq.org.
Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. 720 Cannery Row, 00-1-831- 3731884, www.bubbagump. com. Fun, raucous place, especially if you have seen Forrest Gump. Stuffed shrimp are excellent; skip the chowder. Sea Harvest Fish Market. 598 Foam Street, 00-1-831-6460547. Renowned seafood place where everything rocks and was swimming earlier that day. Try shrimp and calamari; the chowders great.
Big Sur
Nepenthe. Highway 1, 00-1-831-6672345, www.nepenthebigsur.com. Great for lunch or cocktails. Has an incomparable view from 250m above the Pacific waves. Pricey but worth it.
The Henry Miller Library. Highway 1, 00-1-831-6672574, www.henrymiller.org. Catch the small film about Miller on the site; he came to live here when fleeing the German occupation of Paris.
Big Sur has gonzo camping (www.bigsurcalifornia.org), but you may prefer the comforts of Big Sur River Inn (Highway 1 at Pheneger Creek, 00-1-831-6672700, www.bigsurriverinn.com).
Esalen Institute. 55000 Highway 1, Ventana, Big Sur, 00-1-831-6673047, www.esalen.org. An alternative retreat centre where you can stay overnight or longer. Its moonlit ocean-overhanging hot springs are open 1am-3am ($20/€16).
Hearst Castle. 750 Hearst Castle Road, San Simeon, 00-1-805-9272020, www.hearstcastle.org. The centre needs at least 10 days' notice for accessibility-designed tours. Free wheelchairs, or use your own if it can fit through doorways 71cm (28in) wide. Tour includes rooms on the ground floor of the main house, a guest house, the gardens and views of the Neptune Pool and the Roman Pool. For more on accessibility-designed tours call 00-1-805-9272115.
Paso Robles
Paso Robles Inn and Steakhouse. 1103 Spring Street, 00-1-805-2382660, www.pasoroblesinn.com. Historic and lavishly appointed, with garden and nearby hot springs, this is not bad for value: $167 (€135) for double suite and jacuzzi.
Yanagi Japanese Restaurant. 1221 Park Street, 00-1-805-2268867. Stunning sushi and nigiri sake list.
Sycamore Mineral Springs. 1215 Avila Beach Drive,
San Luis Obispo, 00-1-805-5957302, www.sycamoresprings.com. For a more family-oriented version near the beach and with camping facilities and electric cars and kids' stuff, try Avila Hot Springs Resort (250 Avila Beach Drive, San Luis Obispo, 00-1-805-5952359, www.avilahotsprings.com).
Venice Beach
EconoLodge Culver City. 11933 Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles, 00-1-310-3981651, www.econolodge.com. Affordable, comfortable accommodation.
The Terrace. 7 Washington Boulevard, Venice, 00-1-310- 5781530, www.theterracecafe. com. Next to the boardwalk and open every day from 8am to 2pm. ("Dinner, dessert and [a] little sand between your toes" is the motto.) Try the Odessa-style salmon.
Santa Monica and Beverly Hills
Cafe Panini. 9601 Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, 00-1-310-2478300, www.mypaninicafe.com. Go for Middle Eastern plates and lentil soup.
John O'Groats. 10516 Pico Boulevard, West Los Angeles, 00-1-310-2040692, www.ogroatsrestaurant.com.
Yosemite
Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort. 6979 Highway 140, Midpines, 00-1-209-9666666, www.yosemitebug.com. Accommodation varies from low-price dormitory roughing it and tents to quite lavish cabins.