Route 33 - Not just I-5 Exits

Most people get their kicks on Route 66, but on a nice day in April, we got ours on California State Route 33. We were traveling from Vacaville to Los Angeles for family business, and decided to take the scenic route: from the start of Highway 33 to its end. The goal was to stay off the freeway, and the drive started with some nice bay-delta action to get us to Tracy where Hwy. 33 starts. Highway 4 to Byron Road took us out of the Delta and through Tracy, where our Hwy. 33 adventure began in the town of Vernalis.
We were now in the California heartland between Interstate 5 on the west and the San Joaquin River to the east. We were surrounded by orchards and other aesthetically pleasing agricultural ventures, then passed through the small town of Westley. Known previously as only the name of an exit off the fast-moving I-5, Westley was actually a town, with businesses and people and schools, not just a sign. So was Patterson and Crows Landing, Newman, and Gustine. Newman had more to offer than just being a real live town. It had a lunch stop at El Campestre Dos, serving a Mexican shrimp dish that was just short of amazing, along with a refreshing horchata. At Santa Nella, Hwy. 33 zigs across I-5, leaving the orchards, to join the brown grassland characteristic of I-5's lack of scenery. Just past the large channel of water that joins the San Luis Reservoir-O'Neill Forebay with millions of thirsty people in southern California, 33 meets up with Hwy. 152 and zags back east into Los Banos. Back and forth, the highway crosses I-5 to the east and west, alternating orchards with grassy hills, until it finally leaves the Interstate at the Fresno-Coalinga Road and heads into the western hills.

The eastern foothills of the coast range west of I-5 are grassy and rocky, and the road is windy, until it flattens out into a small valley of dried-out fallow farmland. It keeps going south, alternating through valleys and hills, bringing us into California's oil fields. We were suddenly surrounded by oil pumps, known as "grasshoppers", and various other oil-extraction contraptions, as we rolled through the city of Taft and into Maricopa. The grasshoppers at one time were eclectic, some painted as animals. They were all the same now, and the grasshopper-art-of-the-past hopefully now sits in an oil museum. Dinner time in Maricopa, we decided to settle for the night at the Motel 8, along with the sleepy oil workers, and save the mountainous part of the ride for the morning.

In the early morning we were going west and south, past the spectacular Carrizo Plains, Cuyama, and New Cuyama, and into the beautiful Los Padres National Forest. Took in the views overlooking the valleys to the north before winding down into the coast range town of Ojai.

The last time I visited Ojai, I was a small child listening to Krishnamurti speak to a crowd of hippies with long hair and painted bodies. Now, some forty-odd years later, Ojai offered a delightful breakfast at Eggs N Things in the Ojai Valley shopping center and a coffee from Starbucks. That was all I needed to take the remainder of Highway 33 into Interstate 101 to Los Angeles. Times have changed, but not my childhood-born enjoyment of travel to places like this.