In Forza Motorsport 3 and 4, the driving game includes courses on the Amalfi coast in Italy, in Positano which is a World Heritage Site visited by thousands of tourists every month year round. Positano is one of those really amazing places with no parking.
Walk everywhere because its a medieval city. Its very steep. There are paved stone staircases lined with hand-laid rock walls. Same with the few roads through it. Most are also paved in cobblestones. Driving on cobblestones is slippery and jiggly. The seas are usually calm because its the Mediterranean. You can build a jetty and harbors are simplicity itself. There's no serious currents. Its just pretty. A great place for boating, but no actual beach as you can see. Beaches require sand, which comes from sandstone eroding inland or being carried there by currents or rivers. If there's no rivers, there's no sand.
If you look at that sea, imagine it is rough with 10 foot high waves snapping ashore, throwing spray in the air 40 feet high and then blow down into the distance 200 feet in the stiff breeze that rarely stops. That's kinda what the Pacific Coast looks like when the fog burns off, which doesn't happen every day. Somedays it stays foggy and chilly enough to cause hypothermia. Windbreaker jackets exist to deal with that weather. The winds on the Pacific Coast affect the building design, since it is rarely sunny enough to want to hide from it. You make the most of the sun you get, and you shelter your plants and their soil because the wind is so strong it rips their leaves off, twists their branches, and tears away their soil. Its a challenge for an architect since the wind driven rain wets the blown salt spray and causes serious rust of anything steel there, and even corrodes aluminum. The wind blows water up and under clay tile roofs like you see in the pictures, so those are useless there. The sand that blows around chips paint and window glass. There's also landslides, earthquakes, twisty roads and rockslides, and sometimes flashfloods roll down and tear out the hairpin turn of Highway 1. The upshot being there's a lot of maintenance and repairs required if you choose to live near the Pacific Ocean. Contrast with the above calm of the sea in the Amalfi harbor. So pretty. Love to live there, right? But the fish is better in the Pacific. Fish like cold water. It holds more nutrients. The boats in Bodega Bay, which is way more spread out than Positano and Amalfi, are strictly working fishing boats, with a few running whale watching or salmon fishing for the tourists. The bay itself goes shallow enough they raise oysters there. The channel gets dredged every 5-10 years, depending on money available for it. If the salmon come back, there will be money. That's how things are. If the homes were closer together, they'd emulate more of what charms Positano offers. Ultra-dense housing in classic vintage stone makes for a very walkable community. As it is now, Bodega Bay more strongly resembles the set of the 1980's horror flick "The Fog!" by Stephen King. So how can a foggy, windy, smelly place that's often cold become more cute, more walkable, more charming, enough to keep pulling tourists even after most of our oil is so expensive and exported that the drive itself is half the expense? I think about things like that.
The upshot of that expensive drive, and a big part of the draw of the coast itself, beyond views and really delicious locally caught fish, is the drive is long, twisty, scenic, and fantastic in a touring car or sports car, depending on if you're taking your wife or your girlfriend. Because even if you love your girlfriend, your wife will hate her. So strict separation is required. Ahem. That was a joke.
There is a nice loop available too, actually SEVERAL loops available. Marin County and San Francisco folks used to come up through Mill Valley and climb over Mount Tamalpais, which is the road featured in the chase scene of Basic Instinct, which does NOT do those curves justice, then follow Hwy 1 up through Point Reyes Station, along Tamales Bay, past Dillon Beach, and into Sonoma County and up to Bodega Bay through the various twists and turns and beaches, then further up to Jenner and then land on River Road towards Guerneville, following the Russian River through the big Redwood and back to the Wine Country. You end up nearby either Santa Rosa or Healdsburg, depending on a left or right turn, or you can cross over the Highway, go another 10 miles and be in Napa County at the head of Napa Valley in Calistoga, at the north end of the Valley. Napa is at the South end. Between are the best wineries on Earth. That makes a nice place to spend the night and the next day can be wine tasting brunches and a slow meander back home with a properly tame and satisfied woman beside you, no longer fretful and obnoxious. That's what a proper vacation up the coast should do for you. So, if Bodega Bay looked a bit more like Positano, creeping up the hillside, crammed together with walkways, cheerful people waving as they meandered by, would that be worth a visit? I think so. Now repeat with Fort Bragg, Mendocino, Eureka, and those other little seaside towns up Highway 1. And be sure to offer a nice charging lot for all the Tesla's, and B&Bs for the couples to recharge themselves within. So long as California remains as a center for tourism and agriculture, it must continue to focus on those two things so it can make money and justify the costs of its maintenance and visitors.
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