Staying at the youth hostel in Monterey was special in so many ways. I was there as a holding point for Big Sur. I was headed for a monastery about an hour past the Henry Miller library. At the hostel there was something surreal about it more than your usual run of the mill joint. One night, a group of people were having a fire night out in the carpark. There were the usual suspects that haunt the hostel circuit and as I sat down sharing a beer and a smoke I noticed the man opposite me through the flames. It could have been the beer but I’ll be damned if he didn’t look like John Steinbeck. Even his stories had that grapes of wrath verse. The next day I took a bus to Salinas. Sitting on the bus were Mexican workers going here, there, anywhere and everywhere. Looking out onto farm fields I could see the bent over men and women working in the fields under a blazing sun. I went looking for the ghost of Jimmy Dean Finally the bus arrived . I wandered over to the musuem. I hung around for and hour or two soaking up the history of one of America’s greatest writers. It was his compassion that I loved and that I will always love , his empthay for the underdog. There is nothing romantic about the road. It’s a lonely soulless endeavour. It is gut wrenching lonely where you try and fill up the day through drinking and sleeping. You may meet someone and end up in a strange bed in a strange country but even that is like an empty desert . Yet saying that, it’s in those sad hell days of not knowing why you left in the first place where you may find a small light shining within you, or you may not. This is not blogger gaga land . It is what it is. Later that day I found a bar and a Texan . Yep, Texas greatest state in the union, the loud man said. I didn’t care , it was free beer and it eased the loneliness of my travel sadness. When I got back to Monterey I got sick on tequila and beer before heading for the Bixby Bridge, monastery and a crazy gardener poet who took me to Tor House , home of poet Robinson Jeffers in Carmel. When I got home I re- read travels with Charley . It was a time of prayer and booze and false heroes , it was a time when I needed to find some part of me that had gone missing.