If these photos don’t make you want to call in sick, throw a board in your car, and spend a day or two driving the length of California’s Highway 1, then nothing will. There’s just so much to see.
Having grown up in Northern California my association with the ocean has always been closer to redwoods, overcast skies, and cranking the heater after a surf while driving home than the Baywatch style white beaches of Southern California. I loved that. It felt more rugged than most of what I saw in surf magazines. Fast forward to a trip earlier this year, where I found myself asking a buddy to crank the heater in our van so I could get that feeling back in my feet. There was an entire Pacific Ocean between myself and those redwoods back home. We were driving from one side of New Zealand’s North Island to the other after a sunset surf session and I was flipping through my phone showing another (new) friend some images from the winter’s other trips (technically it was still winter back home in California, but summer for the Kiwis). We were gawking at some of the scenery; the landscape images, the sunsets and the lineups that we are all willing to travel thousands of miles to see. Every once in a while we’d stop to take a new photo on the drive back to Auckland, because for anybody who’s been to New Zealand you know you can’t drive more than five minutes without seeing something that looks like it belongs in a travel brochure. Then we scrolled to one amazing sunset shot in my phone. It wasn’t from an exotic beach in Costa Rica. It wasn’t one of those trademark North Shore sunsets. It was actually a random snap from a cliff less than two miles from my own home. A massive cove, waves rolling below, a bright orange sky and purple-blueish ocean in the early evening – California style.
The rest of our drive home we talked about the fact that we – surfers and non surfers alike – constantly want to see something far away. The further from home the more exotic it feels and somehow even more rewarding. At least that’s the intent. Meanwhile, things are just as awe inspiring back home if you pay attention.
This is the simplest context I can relate to Morgan Maassen’s road trip with surfer Nole Cossart. They’re both from the Golden State and they’ve both seen more of the world outside California than myself. So here they are driving up and down that same coastline. It’s the kind of stuff that belongs in a travel brochure, except a good 40 million of us don’t have to even hop on a plane to soak it all up.
