How To Road-Trip Along The California Coast

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Park Hyatt Aviara Resort, Photo Credit: Hyatt Corporation

Leave the whirlwind of warm-weather parties, barbecues and family vacations behind with a little luxe “me time.” Savor the last of the summer rays with a solo road trip to some of our favorite coastal California hideaways. Let sumptuous spas, delicious fine dining and restful resorts guide your way on a high-end adventure guaranteed to leave you feeling refreshed.

DAY ONE: San Diego
No adventure through California is complete without a stop in San Diego. Instead of hitting the more frequented destinations such as downtown, Del Mar or La Jolla, head 40 minutes north of San Diego International Airport to Park Hyatt Aviara Resort in Carlsbad in the North County region. It is a Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star resort with an Arnold Palmer-designed 18-hole golf course with clubhouse, a blissful spa and delicious food.

Morning  
Upon arrival, make your way to the spa to unwind from the drive in. Loosen your limbs with four-hands massage, during which two therapists synchronize to give you the ultimate stress-releaser.

Afterward, linger in the light-filled solarium. Perch yourself on a lounge chair near the inviting fireplace or the trickling fountain and curl up with a magazine.

Afternoon
After this relaxation ritual, have lunch and lounge in one of the well-appointed cabanas, which are outfitted with a daybed, two chaise lounges, a bowl of fresh fruit, a stocked mini-fridge of nonalcoholic drinks and more. When you need to cool off, take a dip in the Adult Pool, which overlooks the Batiquitos Lagoon and the Pacific.

Another form of relaxation can be found with a good drink. When in San Diego, don’t miss a beer tasting, as the area is known for its breweries. Pop into Mother Earth Brew Co., which sits 16 miles from the hotel and emulates the North County vibe that you’ll see throughout the area.

Evening
With your first spa day out of the way, head to Forbes Travel Guide Recommended Vivace, Park Hyatt Aviara’s fine-dining Italian restaurant. Indulge in rich comfort food made with fresh ingredients, including handcrafted burrata, housemade pastas and the braised short rib Bolognese with rigatoni and Parmesan. Be sure to get accompanying pours from the excellent wine list.

Retire for the evening to the property’s spacious, coastal-inspired accommodations and take in the sunset from your private balcony or terrace.

Terranea Resort, Photo Credit: Terranea Resort

DAY TWO:Los Angeles’ South Bay
After a refreshing night’s sleep, try breakfast at Park Hyatt Aviara’s California Bistro before heading north to Los Angeles.

A nice pit stop between San Diego and L.A. is the coastal enclave of the South Bay. It takes about two and a half hours to get there, but once you pull into Forbes Travel Guide Four-Star Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, you should hand the keys over to the valet with no intention of moving for at least 24 hours. The focus here is on the natural seaside environment that is best enjoyed on your private balcony overlooking the gardens and the ocean.

Afternoon
Pass the day away by sampling a few of the eight restaurants on offer at the coastal California resort. For lunch, opt for fresh New American fare with a California flair at Catalina Kitchen. Accompany your meal with an exquisite glass of vino and ocean breezes.  

Spend the rest of your day lounging however you choose — play a round on the nine-hole golf course, check out the spa or take a dip in either of the four swimming pools. Time drips away, putting you in the right frame of mind to mentally check out for a few precious hours before getting back to the hustle and bustle of a road trip.

Evening
Though onsite dinner spots such as Nelson’s and Mar’sel are always good options, we wouldn’t judge you if you decided to make the call for in-room dining before enjoying a refreshing night’s sleep in your stylish Mediterranean-inspired room.

The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco, Photo Credit: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company LLC

DAY THREE: L.A. andSan Francisco
Morning
Take a detour through always-happening West Hollywood for an indulgent brunch. If the call of the day is stargazing, go to Catch, one of the hottest tables in Los Angeles. The New York import is a favorite of the celebrity set, and the menu is packed with globally influenced seafood preparations that transport you around the world in one sitting.

If that isn’t quite your scene, head over to Norah for more decadent fare. The open, bright space bubbles like a freshly poured glass of champagne. Chef Mike Williams packs unforgettable flavors into brunch specialties such as buttermilk biscuits and a crispy fried chicken sandwich.

Afternoon
After feasting and some frolicking, get back on track and depart Los Angeles to make the five-hour drive — and longest leg of this this adventure up the coast — to San Francisco.

Evening
In the evening, check into a classic California beauty, lavish Four-Star The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco, perched high atop Nob Hill on Stockton Avenue. You’ll be immersed in the elegance of a bygone era almost immediately, as the opulent marble lobby dates back to 1909.

For a superb experience, book a deluxe king room on the Club Level and receive access to one of the Ritz-Carlton brand’s top perks — its exclusive lounge. Inside, a concierge is available for all booking needs and there is continuous food and beverage service for noshing when the mood strikes. Enjoy samples from cuisine of the neighborhoods — The Mission, Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown and North Beach — that have made San Francisco famous.

If you’re visiting on a weekend, be sure to take advantage of the hotel’s Vintner Wine Series, where you’ll sip pours of the best of Northern California vintages on Fridays and Saturdays in addition to a caviar presentation with all of the accoutrements.

Spa L’Occitane, Photo Credit: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company LLC

DAY FOUR: San Francisco
Morning
The fourth and final day of this road trip is one dedicated to the good life. At The Ritz-Carlton, check out the Spa L’Occitane by the Bay for the hour-long Immortelle Secret of Youth facial that removes signs of aging and makes the skin more smooth and youthful. L’Occitane treatments blend Provencal-inspired rituals with its signature products enriched with ingredients from the South of France.

Afternoon
After some down time at the intimate spa, liven up your afternoon with a stop at the crown jewel of the San Francisco hotel’s social spaces: The JCB Tasting Lounge from winemaker Jean-Charles Boisset. A jewel box of a space nestled in the lobby, this is the spot to taste rare and exclusive wines from the Boisset collection.

After lunch, work off the calories with a three-block walk to Union Square, a retail mecca with more than 200 shops, departments stores, more restaurants and an event calendar stuffed with all sorts of fun (The Graduate screens at the park on September 9).

Evening
For those who like to plan ahead, aim for dinner at Mina Test Kitchen, one of the most coveted spots in town, to venture out from the confines of the incredibly comfortable hotel. A space for Michael Mina’s team to test new culinary concepts, the cuisines are revolving and currently feature the “Mi Almita” theme, which pays homage to the spirituality and tradition of Mexican cooking.

Expect ceviches, moles, tacos and empanadas featuring traditional, authentic ingredients. The menu is fixed but there are choices within the courses and two different levels of wine pairings.

At the end of the night, come back to a placid view of the city and relax under the rain shower in the full marble bath before climbing into a bed decked out in Frette linens and a 46-inch TV.

Parallel 37, Photo Credit: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company LLC

DAY FIVE: San Francisco
Before returning to a non-vacation mindset, brunch at Four-Star Parallel 37, The Ritz Carlton’s signature restaurant, is unmissable. Specialties include an offering of Chinese dim sum, avocado toast with Easter egg radishes and sprouted quinoa and Dungeness crab eggs Benedict. Fill up before heading back home with a refreshed view of coastal California.

Dispossessed in the Land of Dreams

Read article : Dispossessed in the Land of Dreams

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Sometime in July 2012, Suzan Russaw and her husband, James, received a letter from their landlord asking them to vacate their $800-a-month one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, California. He gave them 60 days to leave. The “no-fault” eviction is a common way to clear out low-paying tenants without a legal hassle and bring in people willing to pay thousands more in rent. James was 83 at the time and suffering from the constellation of illnesses that affect the old: He had high blood pressure and was undergoing dialysis for kidney failure and experiencing the early stages of dementia.

Their rent was actually a couple of hundred dollars more than James’s monthly Social Security benefits, but he made up the rest by piecing together odd jobs. They looked for a new apartment for two months and didn’t find anything close to their price range. Their landlord gave them a six-week extension, but it yielded nothing. When mid-October came, Suzan and James had no choice but to leave. With hurried help from neighbors, they packed most of their belongings into two storage units and a ramshackle 1994 Ford Explorer which they called “the van.” They didn’t know where they were going.

A majority of the homeless population in Palo Alto—93 percent—ends up sleeping outside or in their cars. In part, that’s because Palo Alto, a technology boomtown that boasts a per capita income well over twice the average for California, has almost no shelter space: For the city’s homeless population, estimated to be at least 157, there are just 15 beds that rotate among city churches through a shelter program called Hotel de Zink; a charity organizes a loose network of 130 spare rooms, regular people motivated to offer up their homes only by neighborly goodwill. The lack of shelter space in Palo Alto—and more broadly in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, which comprise the peninsula south of San Francisco and around San Jose—is unusual for an area of its size and population. A 2013 census showed Santa Clara County having more than 7,000 homeless people, the fifth-highest homeless population per capita in the country and among the highest populations sleeping outside or in unsuitable shelters like vehicles.

San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area are gentrifying rapidly—especially with the most recent Silicon Valley surge in social media companies, though the trend stretches back decades—leading to a cascade of displacement of the region’s poor, working class, and ethnic and racial minorities. In San Francisco itself, currently the city with the most expensive housing market in the country, rents increased 13.5 percent in 2014 from the year before, leading more people to the middle-class suburbs. As real estate prices rise in places like Palo Alto, the middle class has begun to buy homes in the exurbs of the Central Valley, displacing farmworkers there.

Suzan, who is 70, is short and slight, with her bobbed hair dyed red. The first time I met her, she wore leggings, a T-shirt, a black cardigan wrapped around her shoulders, and fuzzy black boots I later learned were slippers she’d gotten from Goodwill and sewn up to look like outside shoes. (She wore basically the same outfit, with different T-shirts, nearly every time we met, and I realized she didn’t have many clothes.) Her voice is high and singsongy and she is always polite. You can tell she tries to smooth out tensions rather than confront them. She is a font of forced sunniness and likes to punctuate a sad sentence with phrases like “I’m so blessed!” or “I’m so lucky!” She wore a small necklace and said jewelry was important to her. “I feel, to dispel the image of homelessness, it’s important to have a little bling,” she said.

In the van, Suzan was in charge of taking care of everyone and everything, organizing a life that became filled with a unique brand of busy boredom. She and James spent most of their time figuring out where to go next, how to get there, and whether they could stay once they arrived. They found a short-term unit in a local family shelter in Menlo Park that lasted for five weeks. Afterward, they stayed in a few motels, but even fleabags in the area charge upwards of $100 a night. When they couldn’t afford a room they camped out in the van, reclining the backseats and making a pallet out of blankets piled on top of their clothes and other belongings. Slowly, there were fewer nights in hotels and more in the van, until the van was where they lived.

A life of homelessness is one of logistical challenges and exhaustion. Little things, like planning a wardrobe for the week, involved coordinated trips to storage units and laundromats, and could take hours. The biggest conundrum? Where to pull over and sleep. Suzan and James learned quickly not to pull over on a residential block, because the neighbors would call the police. They tried a church or two, 24-hour businesses where they thought they could hide amidst the other cars, and even an old naval field. The places with public toilets were best because, for reasons no one can quite explain, 3 a.m. is the witching hour for needing to pee. They kept their socks and shoes on, both for staying warm on chilly Bay Area nights and also for moving quickly if someone peered into their windows, or a cop flashed his light inside, ready to rouse. Wherever they were sleeping, they couldn’t sleep there. “Sometimes, I was so tired, I would be stopped at a red light and say, ‘Don’t go to sleep. Don’t go to sleep,’” Suzan said. “And then I would fall asleep.”

A few months in, a nice man in a 7-Eleven parking lot told them about a former high school turned community center on the eastern side of town called Cubberley. He’d walked up to their van after recognizing signs of life in the car, tired faces among the junk piling up in the back. Suzan and James were familiar with the community center because they’d taken their daughter to preschool there many years before, but they hadn’t thought about sleeping there. Cubberley had a quiet back parking lot, a flat grass amphitheater with a concrete paddock for a stage, and 24-hour public bathrooms with showers in an old gym. Rumor was that the cops wouldn’t bother anyone.

Suzan’s husband, James Russaw, pictured with two of their grandchildren.

Cubberley was a psychic relief because it solved so many basic needs: It had a place to bathe in the morning, a place to charge your phone. The parking lot had also formed its own etiquette and sense of community. People tended to park in the same places, a spot or two next to their neighbors, and they recognized one another and nodded at night. They weren’t exactly friends, but they were people who trusted each other, an impromptu neighborhood no one wanted to lose after losing so much. It was safe, a good place to spend the night. But it was next door to a segment of homeowners who were fighting hard to move the car dwellers out.

Normally, wealthy people who move into an area don’t see the results of their displacement because the people who lose their homes don’t stick around; they move to cheaper suburbs and work themselves into the fabric elsewhere. But the folks at Cubberley, 30 people on any given night, were the displacement made manifest. Most weren’t plagued with mental health or substance abuse problems; they simply could no longer afford rent and became homeless in the last place they lived. People will put up with a lot to stay in a place they know. “I’ve been analyzing why don’t I just get the heck on. Everybody says that, go to Wyoming, Montana, you can get a mansion,” Suzan said. “Move on, move on, always move on. And I say to myself, ‘Why should I have to move on?’”

It’s a new chapter in an old story. In his seminal 1893 lecture at the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner summarized the myth of the American frontier and the waves of settlers who created it as an early form of gentrification: First, farmers looking for land would find a remote spot of wilderness to tame; once they succeeded, more men and women would arrive to turn each new spot into a town; finally, outside investors would swoop in, pushing out the frontiersman and leaving him to pack up and start all over again. It has always been thus in America. Turner quoted from a guide published in 1837 for migrants headed for the Western frontiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin: “Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The ‘settler’ is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise of property, push farther into the interior, and become himself a man of capital and enterprise in turn.” This repeating cycle, Turner argued, of movement and resettlement was essential to the American character. But he foresaw a looming crisis. “The American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise,” he wrote. “But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves.” In other words, we would run out of places for the displaced to go.

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Suzan was born in 1945. Her father worked at what was then the Lockheed Corporation, and her mother had been raised by a wealthy family in Oak Park, Illinois. Her family called her Suzi. Though she grew up in nearby Saratoga—and spent some time in school in Switzerland—she distinctly remembers coming with her mother to visit Palo Alto, with its downtown theaters and streets named after poets. Palo Alto more than any other place formed the landscape of her childhood. “It was a little artsy-craftsy university town—you find charming towns are university towns.”

Like many women of her day, Suzan didn’t graduate from college. When she was 24, after her last stay in Switzerland, she moved to Mountain View, the town on Palo Alto’s eastern border that is now home to Google and LinkedIn. She was living off a small trust her family had set up for her when she met James at a barbecue their apartment manager threw to foster neighborliness among his tenants. James had grown up in a sharecropping family in Georgia, moved west during World War II, and was more than 17 years her senior, handsome and gentlemanly. Suzan thought: “I can learn something from him.” They were an interracial couple in the late 1960s, which was unusual, though she says her family didn’t mind. It was also an interclass marriage, and it moved Suzan down the income ladder.

For years, James and Suzan lived together, unmarried. They bought a house on University Avenue, just north of the county line and blocks from downtown Palo Alto, in 1979, and four years later had their only daughter, Nancy. It was the area’s ghetto, and the only source of affordable housing for many years. It was also the center of violence in the region, and, in 1992, was the murder capital of the country.

They never had much money. For most of their marriage, James ran a small recycling company and Suzan acted as his bookkeeper, secretary, and housewife. They refused to apply for most government assistance, even as homeless elders. “My husband and I had never been on welfare or food stamps,” she told me. “Even to this day.”

Suzan’s parents died in 2002 and 2003, and her older sister died in 2009. (“I thank God that they’re gone,” she told me. “They would die if they saw me now.”) It was a hard time for Suzan, who went to care for her dying parents and nearly left James. She felt he’d checked out of the difficulties. In retrospect, she thinks his dementia might already have been setting in; James was already in his seventies. He had taken out a second mortgage on their home, and they couldn’t pay it after he retired. They sold the house at a loss in 2005; it’s now a Century 21 office.

After they moved into the van, they settled into a routine. On the nights before James’s early-morning treatments, they slept in the dialysis center’s parking lot. Otherwise they generally stayed at Cubberley. They were still living off James’s retirement income, but most of it went to the $500 needed to rent the two storage units where their furniture remained, until they lost one for nonpayment. Finally, a few months in, Suzan was able to use a clause in a trust set up by her mother’s father to help her out in an emergency. It doubled their income—much of which was eaten up by the costs of gas, the remaining storage unit, parking tickets, and the other expenses of an unsettled life. It was a respectable income, one that technically kept them above poverty, but it still wasn’t enough for rent.

James was increasingly ill and van life was taking a toll. In addition to James’s other problems, both he and Suzan were starting to experience some of the health problems common among the homeless. The backseat of the van filled with bags of clothes, papers, fast-food detritus, pens, old parking tickets, and receipts. As the junk built up, the recline of their seats inched forever upward, until they were sitting up all the time, causing their legs to swell and nerves to become damaged, the medical consequences of not being able to raise your feet at night.

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Gentrification used to be about poor neighborhoods, usually black and brown, underdeveloped and full of decrepit and neglected housing stock, run by the occasional slumlord—often described as “blighted,” though that designation has always been problematic—and how they become converted into wealthier ones, usually through the influx of richer white people and their demand for new services and new construction. It’s a negative process for the people who have to move, but there’s occasionally an element of good, because neglected neighborhoods revive. But what’s happening now in the Bay Area is that people who’ve done nothing wrong—not paid their rent late, violated their lease, or committed any other housing sin—are being forced out to make way. Displacement is reaching into unquestionably vibrant, historic, middle- and working-class neighborhoods, like The Mission in San Francisco, a former center of Chicano power. (The Mission alone has lost 8,000 Latino residents in the past ten years, according to a report from the local Council of Community Housing Organizations and the Mission Economic Development Agency.) And it’s happening to such an extent that the social workers who used to steer people to affordable apartments as far away as Santa Rosa or Sacramento, a two-hour drive, are now telling people to look even farther out. The vehicle dwellers I spoke with said they’d heard of friends living in places like Stockton, once a modest working-class city in the middle of the state, receiving notice-to-vacate letters like the one Suzan and James received.

For the most part, the traits that draw people to Palo Alto—good schools, a charming downtown, nice neighborhoods in which to raise a family, and a short commute to tech jobs—are the very same things that made the residents of Cubberley want to stay, even if it meant living in their car. The destabilizing pressure of a real estate market is also felt by the merely rich, the upper middle class, and the middle class, because the high-end demand of the global elite sets the market prices. “My block has the original owners, a retired schoolteacher and a retired postal worker,” said Hope Nakamura, a legal aid attorney who lives in Palo Alto. “They could never afford to buy anything there now.” Most people told me if they had to sell their homes today they wouldn’t be able to buy again anywhere in the area, which means many Palo Altans have all of their wealth tied up in expensive homes that they can’t access without upending their lives. It makes everyone anxious.

The view inside a van parked outside a Palo Alto homeless organization.

The outcry from the neighbors over Cubberley was so fierce that it reshaped Palo Alto’s city government. The city council is nonpartisan, but a faction emerged that revived an old, slow-growth movement in town, known as the “residentialists.” Their concerns are varied (among them, the perennial suburban concerns of property values and traffic), but their influence has been to block any new development of affordable housing and shoo people like Suzan and James away from Palo Alto. An uproar scuttled an affordable-housing building for senior citizens near many public transit options that had been proposed by the city housing authority and unanimously approved by the city council. Opponents said they were worried about the effect the development would have on the surrounding community—they argued it wasn’t zoned for “density,” which is to say, small apartments—and that traffic congestion in the area would be made worse. Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, then a senior at Stanford, tried to start a women’s-only shelter in rotating churches, modeled after the Hotel de Zink. She said a woman came up to her after a community meeting where the same concerns had been raised by a real estate agent. “Her lips were quivering and she was physically shaking from how angry she was,” Ananthasubramaniam told me. “She was like, ‘You come back to me 20 years from now once you have sunk more than $1 million into an asset, like a house, and you tell me that you’re willing to take a risk like this.”

The trouble for Cubberley began when neighbors went to the police. There’d been at least one fight, and the neighbors complained about trash left around the center. At the time, Cubberley was home to a 64-year-old woman who’d found a $20-an-hour job after nine years of unemployment; a tall, lanky, panhandler from Louisiana who kept informal guard over her and other women at the center; a 63-year-old part-time school crossing guard who cared for his dying mother for 16 years, then lived off the proceeds from the sale of her house until the money ran out; two retired school teachers; a 23-year-old Palo Alto native who stayed with his mother in a rental car after his old car spontaneously combusted; and, for about six months, Suzan and James. “They didn’t fit this image that the powers that be are trying to create about homeless people. They did not fit that image at all,” Suzan told me. “We made sure the premises were respected, because it was an honor to be able to stay there.” She and others told me they cleaned up their areas at the center every morning.

“I said, ‘We have no place to go, and we’re staying right here.’ They were going to know about it.”

Pressured to find a way to move the residents out, the police department went to the city council claiming they needed a law banning vehicle habitation to address the neighbors’ concerns. Advocates for the homeless said that any problems could be solved if police would just enforce existing laws. Local attorneys warned the city council that such laws could soon be considered unconstitutional, because the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was hearing a challenge to a similar law in Los Angeles. Carrie LeRoy, an attorney who advocated on behalf of the unhoused, and other attorneys threatened to file a class-action lawsuit if the vehicle-habitation ban ever went into effect. The city council passed the ban anyway, in a 7-2 vote in August 2013, and the police department and other groups in the city started an outreach program to tell people about the law. “All of them had received these notices from the city,” LeRoy said, “And it was basically like, ‘Get out of our town.’”

A few weeks later, the city council also voted to close the showers at Cubberley and give it a 10:30 p.m. curfew, which made it illegal to sleep there. On their last night there, in October 2013, Suzan and James left around 8 p.m. so they wouldn’t get caught past the new curfew. They tried some old haunts and got kicked out. The stress of living in the van was hard on James. Around this time, James decided to end his dialysis. “Of course, we knew what that meant,” Suzan said.

One night, about a month after leaving Cubberley, the police pulled Suzan and James over. Their registration was expired. “This officer, he got a wild hair, and he said, ‘I’m going to impound your car,’ and called the tow truck.” Suzan told me. They got out of the car. Without pushing and demanding, she realized, she was never going to get out of the situation. She told me she said to the officer, “This is our home, and if you impound it we will not have a home.” He insisted. “I said ‘That’s fine. You do that. We will stay right here. I will put the beds out, I will put what we need here, right here on the sidewalk.” Other officers arrived and talked to them. They asked Suzan whether, surely, there was some other place they could go. “I said, ‘We have no place to go, and we’re staying right here.’ I was going to make a stink. They were going to know about it.” Suzan told me people were poking their heads out of their homes, and she realized the bigger fuss she made, the more likely officers might decide just to leave them alone.

Because James’s health had continued to worsen, he and Suzan finally qualified for motel vouchers during the cold weather. They got a room in a rundown hotel. “It had a microwave and a hot bath,” Suzan said. In his last few days, James was given a spot in a hospice in San Jose, and Suzan went with him. “It was so cut-and-dry. They said, ‘This is an end-of-life bed, period,’ ” Suzan said. “And I never said that to James.” He died on February 17, 2014, and a few weeks later a friend of theirs held a memorial service for James at her house. Suzan wore an old silk jacket of her mother’s, one that would later be ruined by moisture in the van, and a necklace Nancy had made. They ate James’s favorite foods—cornbread, shrimp, and pound cake. Suzan had a few motel vouchers left, and afterward stayed with friends and volunteers for a few weeks each, but she felt she was imposing.

That summer, she returned to her van. It was different without James; she realized she’d gotten to know him better during their van life than she ever had before. Maybe it was his dementia, but as they drove around or sat together, squished amidst their stuff, he’d started to tell her long stories, over and over, of his youth in Georgia. She’d never heard the tales before, but she’d started to be able to picture it all. On her own, without his imposing figure beside her, Suzan was scared, and more than a little lonely. Most nights, she stayed tucked away in a church parking lot, without permission from the pastor, hidden between bushes and vans. The law wasn’t being enforced, but sleeping in the lot made her a kind of a criminal. “The neighbors never gave me up,” she said.

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Suzan told me she was in a fog of denial after James’s death, but it’s probably what protected her because homelessness is exhausting. “You start to lose it after a while,” she said. “You feel disenfranchised from your own society.” The Downtown Streets Team, a local homeless organization, had been helping her look for a long-term, stable housing solution. Indeed, Suzan told me that at various times, she and James had 27 applications in for affordable housing in Palo Alto. (When he died, she had to start over, submitting new applications for herself.) Her social worker at the local senior citizens center, Emily Farber, decided to also look for a temporary situation that would get Suzan under a roof for a few months, or even a few weeks. “We were dealing with very practical limitations: having a computer, having a stable phone number,” Farber said. Craigslist was only something Suzan had heard of. She’d finally gotten a cell phone through a federal program, but hadn’t quite mastered it.

For many months, Farber struck out. She didn’t think Suzan would want to live with three 25-year-old Google employees, or that they’d want her, either. She even tried Airbnb. Because Suzan didn’t have a profile, Farber used her own, and wrote to people who had rooms listed to say her 69-year-old friend needed a place to stay in the area for a couple of weeks. “We got three rejections in a row,” she said. Finally, in November, they found a room available for rent for $1,100—about 80 percent of her income from the trust and her widow’s benefits from Social Security. Suzan would have her own bedroom and bathroom in the two-bedroom apartment of a single mother. The mother crowded into the other bedroom with her 16-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. The only downside for Suzan was that it was in Santa Clara, another charmingly bland suburban enclave in the South Bay, a half hour south of Palo Alto and a world away for Suzan. “It’s out of my comfort zone, but that’s OK!” she told me.

I met Suzan on the day she moved in, and the concept of being able to close a door was almost as unsettling to her as the concept of sleeping in the van had been. “I’m in this kind of survival mode,” she said, and had found a certain comfort in her van. “I’ve got this little cocoon I’m staying in, and everything is within arm’s reach.” She had a big blue mat in the back of the van, like a grown-up version of the kind kindergartners nap on, but soon she’d acquire a bed. She retrieved her old TV from her storage unit. She made a comfortable room, with chairs and a bed and a small table, and decided to eat her meals in there. She only signed a lease for three months, because it wasn’t really sustainable on her fixed income. She’d also applied for an affordable housing complex being built for seniors in Sunnyvale, one that would provide permanent housing for 60 senior citizens from among the 7,000 homeless people in the county at the time. She’d find out in April if she was selected in the lottery. All her hopes were pinned on it.

Mapping Suzan Russaw’s Life in Silicon Valley

In the first few weeks after her move to Santa Clara, Suzan spent a healthy portion of her limited income on gas, driving the Explorer back and forth to Palo Alto. After all, her post office box was there, and so were her social workers. Her errands demanded a lot of face time, and in some ways, she still filled her days the way she had before she got her room, moving around trying to solve her problems. Her car was still packed, too, as if she hadn’t let go of the need to drive in it, to move forward, to keep her stuff around her within arm’s reach, as if she were still without a home base.

Two afternoons a week she went to a Palo Alto food closet. She usually made it right before it closed, in the early afternoons. When her number was called, she went up to the counter to watch the volunteer sort through what was left on the shelves, finding the most recently expired items—these were older goods grocery stores couldn’t keep past their sell-by dates. Suzan’s politeness was, as always, almost formal, from an earlier era, when being ladylike was a learned skill. The volunteer would ask her if she wanted milk, or peaches, or a serving-size Baggie of cereal, and she’d say, “Yes, very much so!” These days, she got to take raw eggs instead of the boiled ones, a treat reserved for those with kitchens. Her requests were glancing rather than direct. “Have you any lettuce?” and the answer was often no. I said it seemed like an efficient operation. Suzan said, “I really know the drill!”

Suzan needed to visit her social worker, Julia Lang, at the Downtown Streets Team office to get the form that allowed her to go to an even better food bank. She asked the receptionist whether her social worker was in. She wasn’t, and Suzan explained she was looking for the food bank vouchers. Then the receptionist asked for her address. That stopped Suzan. The receptionist explained that the pantry was for Palo Alto residents, and Suzan was considering, for the first time, whether that counted her. Suzan explained that she and her husband had gone to the pantry the year before, and said they should be in the system. We waited while the receptionist looked. Suzan waved at someone she’d seen around for years, from her car-dwelling days. Suzan told the receptionist, again, that they really should be in the system. But they weren’t. Suzan said that was OK, and she would come back. The receptionist said, “Are you sure? I just need your ID and your address.” Suzan demurred. She needed to talk to her social worker. This is what it meant to have to leave her hometown. She was leaving the city where she and James had known people, the city where James had died, the city where she’d grown up and near where she’d raised her own daughter. It was the city where she knew where to go, where she’d figured out how to be homeless. It was the city where she knew the drill.

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That homelessness persists in Silicon Valley has puzzled me. It has an extremely wealthy population with liberal, altruistic values. Though it has a large homeless population relative to its size, in sheer numbers it’s not as large as New York City’s or L.A.’s. Some of the reasons could be found in the meeting on November 17, 2014, when the city finally overturned the car-camping ban. It had never been enforced because, as predicted, the Ninth Circuit had overturned L.A.’s ban. In the end, all but one person who’d voted for the ban the first time around voted to overturn it. The lone dissenter was councilman Larry Klein. “The social welfare agency in our area is the county, not the city,” he said. “To think we can solve the homeless problem just doesn’t make sense.”

This idea was repeated many times among city officials—that homelessness was too big an issue for the city to resolve. The city of Palo Alto itself has one full-time staff member devoted to homelessness, and it coordinates with county and nonprofit networks to counsel, house, and feed the homeless.

Suzan shows where she stored food in her car while homeless.

During the fight over the ban, the city tried to devise an alternative—a program that would allow car dwellers to park at churches—but then left the details up to the faith community to work out. Nick Selby, an attorney and member of the Palo Alto Friends Meeting House, said he and his fellow Quakers met with community resistance when they tried to accommodate three or four car dwellers on their tiny lot. Neighbors circulated a petition listing concerns like “the high prevalence of mental illness, drug abuse, and communicable diseases in the homeless population” and the risk of declining property values. But Selby said some of their concerns were fair. “People who objected were saying to the city, ‘What’s your program?’” Selby said. “And the city really had no answer to those questions.” Without a solid plan and logistical help from the city, other churches were reluctant to step forward. “The churches weren’t prepared to deal with this,” he said. After the church car-camping plan fell through, the city council said it had no choice but a ban.

Santa Clara County, too, struggles to address the problem. The county is participating in federal programs to build permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless population, the population of long-term homeless who typically have interacting mental health and substance abuse problems. But land is expensive here, and the area is shortchanged by the federal formula that disperses funds. California, ever in budget-crisis mode, provides limited state funds. There isn’t a dedicated funding stream from the cities, which don’t necessarily pay a tax to the county for these projects, and local affordable housing developments are often rejected by residents as Palo Alto’s was. In September, the city of San Jose and the county announced a $13 million program to buy old hotels and renovate them as shelters, which will make 585 new beds available. While advocates credit the county’s efforts with cutting the estimated homeless population by 14 percent since 2013, the number of people like Suzan, who hide in their cars, is almost certainly underestimated. But most such efforts are centered in San Jose. Chris Richardson, a director of the Bay Area’s Downtown Streets Team, said what needs to happen is not a mystery: Other cities have to fund affordable housing, they have to fund more of it, and they have to do it in their own neighborhoods, without relying on San Francisco and San Jose to absorb all of the area’s poverty and problems. “You can’t just ship them down to the big, poor city,” he said.

When Palo Alto originally passed the car-camping ban, it also devoted $250,000 to the county’s homelessness program. When they voted to rescind the ban, council members asked for an update on what happened to the money. The city staff was not prepared to report on how it had been spent at that council meeting, more than a year into the funding. Members of the council again reiterated their desire to help the homeless. “Helping the homeless” was tabled, as a general idea, for another agenda at another meeting, as it always seems to be, or passed off to the county, or to someone else—and so helping the homeless is something nobody does.

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Through the winter, Suzan remained ill; it was a bad flu season. She kept paying the rent on her room, on her storage units, on her P.O. box in Palo Alto, and she tried setting aside money she owed on parking tickets. Some months she’d run out of gas money to drive the 15 miles to Palo Alto and check her mail or visit her social workers. She was waiting to hear about the affordable apartment.

In May, she was denied. Suzan had bad credit, both because of the unpaid storage unit she and James had lost and because otherwise her credit history was so thin. Julia Lang, one of her social workers, told me she couldn’t even get a credit score for Suzan. Lang said people get denied on credit, or because they make too little for affordable housing that’s supposedly intended for extremely low-income people, all the time. “When you’re that destitute and have gone through so many complicated situations, what are the chances that your credit’s going to be good?” she said.

Suzan was livid and despondent, and she decided to appeal. “I wasn’t going to take that lying down,” Suzan told me. “I was proud of myself.” Catholic Charities helped her appeal. Suzan had to write a letter showing how she intended to repair her credit, and that she understood why it was bad in the first place. During the months of back and forth, Suzan bought a new Jeep, only one year newer than the Explorer, in case she needed to sleep in her car again. In July, she learned she’d won her appeal. She had two weeks to get her affairs in order, pay the first month’s rent and security deposit, and move in. Her social workers helped her with some of the move-in costs, and she signed a lease for a year.

I saw Suzan again in August, about three weeks after she’d moved in. Her hair was trimmed. She was wearing a brightly colored muumuu, blue and green with tropical flowers—“It’s a housedress but you can wear it out on the street!”—and a green sweater tied around her shoulders. She seemed relaxed and rested, and I told her so. Her bed was full of folded clothes, and her room was still in disarray. She was trying to cull her storage unit so that she could get a smaller one and cut down on rent. Most of the people in her complex had been in the same boat as Suzan, or had been worse off. She pays $810 a month, the amount determined to be affordable for her income. It had taken her more than three years, help from at least three social workers, and thousands of dollars, but she was finally stably housed. At least, for a year. 

This Summer, Get Ready to Wander: Samsara Ubud at Bali Now Accepting Reservations, Business News

Read article : This Summer, Get Ready to Wander: Samsara Ubud at Bali Now Accepting Reservations, Business News

Leisure guests, city dwellers and business travellers, your search for a tranquil holiday destination is over.

BALI, Indonesia, Aug. 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- If you have always fantasised about running off to an unspoilt tropical paradise and being cocooned in luxury, dream no longer. Located in Bali's lush district of Payangan, Samsara Ubud is the creme de la creme of laid-back luxury and the epitome of secluded chic. The strategic location of the resort offers an exceptional sense of calm, yet is only a 20-minute drive to the bustling town of Ubud.

Samsara Ubud, Bali - Indonesia.

An hour and a half drive from Ngurah Rai International Airport is all it takes to get you to the holiday haven. Ideal for romantic holidays, special celebrations, family gatherings and summer getaways of friends, Samsara Ubud is all about luxury aesthetics and is the perfect sanctuary with a soul. The tranquil surroundings, beaming smiles and friendly service provided by the staff will keep you wishing, "I need more holidays."

Seventeen glorious villas -- 8 one-bedroom pool villa, 6 one-bedroom deluxe pool villa, 2 two-bedroom pool villa and 1 three-bedroom pool villa -- make up this stunning resort. Meticulously designed by internationally acclaimed Bali architect, Popo Danes, all villas are equally sumptuous, lavishly decorated and absolutely astounding. Samsara Ubud has been designed to be in complete harmony with nature by taking the natural land contour into account. The integration of sustainable design strategies can also be seen from how the original contour of the land is maintained. The multi-level and layered architecture is a tribute to Bali's centuries-old rice terraces, providing all villas with views of the lush tropical jungle.

Each villa, starting from 122 square metres, comes with a private heated infinity pool and a spacious outdoor area. Take a dip in the warm infinity pool and relish the beauty of the forest in addition to the soft sounds from a nearby waterfall. Stunning bathrooms feature luxurious Makassar marble, double vanities, deep soaking bathtub and separate indoor & outdoor showers. A mix of contemporary Balinese décor, rich teak furnishings and exotic fabrics create the villas' statement interior.

Samsara Ubud's dining venue, The Kelusa, presents a spectacular dining experience. Chef Iwan Sutrisno and his team offer delectable dishes which celebrate the rich and diverse culinary history of Balinese and Indonesian food. The combination of serene surrounding and gourmet dishes, guaranteed to satisfy even the fussiest epicurean.

If you can stray from the comfort of your villa, a plethora of activities is available to enjoy the lush tropical forests of Payangan and nearby attractions. Participate in cultural activities such as exploring nearby Kelusa village or experience a Balinese water purification ritual at Tirta Empul water temple. Adventurous souls will enjoy activities such as Mount Batur sunrise trek, Tegalalang cycle tour and Campuhan ridge walk.

To soothe your soul, Chakra Spa provides you with the ultimate beauty and relaxation experience. Chakra Spa at Samsara Ubud is a temple of wellbeing where you can truly take care of yourself and take the time to relax. Chakra Spa's experienced therapies, a range of treatments featuring soothing massages and rejuvenating body scrubs will help you achieve a perfect state of relaxation. Other leisure facilities include a fully-equipped gym, a sauna and two heated outdoor pools.

Be among the first to experience Samsara Ubud:
To welcome its first guests, Samsara Ubud offers a special introductory rate for stays from 1^stAugust 2017 until 30^thNovember 2017. Receive 40% savings on the regular room rate, as well as a complimentary airport pickup for a minimum 3-night stay. Reservations may be made online or call +62 811 846769 for more information.

www.samsaraubud.com

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Driving in the U.S.'s Only All-Female Endurance Road Race

Read article : Driving in the U.S.'s Only All-Female Endurance Road Race

It was 4 p.m. and 90 degrees when we finally decided to give up. For hours, Jaclyn and I had been inching our Jeep Rubicon along a dusty unmarked road in the Mojave National Preserve, eventually finding ourselves trapped in a high-walled canyon. We had no idea how far off course we were: Two miles? Twenty? We hadn't seen another human all afternoon. Soon it would be dusk, then nightfall.

We were lost. Not Can you pull up Google Maps?lost, or Do we still have a road atlas somewhere?lost. No, we were Are we in California or Nevada?lost; Thank god we have emergency supplieslost; This landscape would be gorgeous if it weren't so apocalyptic lost. The Jeep's GPS system had been disabled, and our phones and laptops were turned off and sealed in envelopes. We had a collection of specialized large-scale topographical maps, but to figure out where you are on a topo map (a relief map that shows a region's geographical features), you have to know how to read it. I was supposed to be the better topo reader in our pair, and I could barely pick out the most prominent landmarks. If coyotes or unfriendly strangers appeared, we'd be completely, royally screwed.

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Is that the road?

Nicole Dreon

We sat in the Jeep with the air conditioning on high, eating sugary energy chews and gulping down coconut water.

We'd signed up for this. Willingly. For fun.

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That was day four of the inaugural Rebelle Rally, a female-only navigational road rally—the first of its kind. For seven days last fall, 72 women—36 teams of two—off-roaded over 1250 miles, through two national parks and five Bureau of Land Management areas (government-managed public lands). We started in Nevada's Lake Tahoe and ended in Glamis, California; in between, we rambled down dirt roads, clambered over dry riverbeds and mountain passes, and coasted over terrifyingly high sand dunes.

This all called for a set of navigation skills no one uses anymore—unless you're a sailor or a fifth grader prepping for a social studies test.

Throughout the course, 140 checkpoints were hidden behind broken-down mine shacks, just beyond hairpin turns, deep inside mountain crevices, and sometimes, blessedly, directly on the route. Large green flags marked the easiest-to-find checkpoints; smaller blue flags identified intermediate ones. Black checkpoints, the most difficult to find, weren't marked at all. Each was worth a certain number of points. The goal: Rack up as many as possible.

Every morning we were given a list of checkpoints to find that day (one day there'd be 12; another day, 22), defined solely by their latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. We had to plot them on our topo maps, then use geometry to strategize how to get from one to the next. This all called for a set of navigation skills no one uses anymore—unless you're a sailor or a fifth grader prepping for a social studies test. We weren't allowed phones, GPS, or outside help. Kind of like an adult female Eagle Scouts on steroids, or Survivor meets The Amazing Race in the American West.

One of our topo maps; early morning plotting at camp.

Whitney Joiner; Nicole Dreon

The automotive world is notoriously male-dominated, making a women-only motorsports event revolutionary. (There are a few all-women rallies and races scattered across the globe, out of hundreds of annual motorsports events overall; the Rebelle is the only one in the U.S.) "I've been in races where I was the only woman driving," the Rebelle's founder, 50-year-old Emily Miller, told me. "I've had people recommend I wear a tight pink race suit."

Miller grew up between Arkansas and Colorado, skiing, biking, and reading her father's car magazines. In her 30s, she launched a sports marketing firm and started to race cars and teach at racing and off-roading schools. When creating the Rebelle—which took three years of planning, 40 Bureau of Land Management permits, and 60 staffers to pull off—Miller combined her favorite aspects of the rallies and races she'd participated in over the years.

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She was determined to create an event where women could test their mettle. "Most automotive events are designed from a man's perspective," Miller said, meaning that they're usually speed races, where the goal is to get from Point A to B as fast as possible. But the Rebelle isn't a race, she reminded us daily. It demanded endurance, accurate navigation, and communication. "Women excel in endurance events," she explained. "Women think about the rules and the challenge. They want to win, but they're not there to prove how fast they can go."

My team's combined experience was…limited. "Winning" never crossed our minds; we just hoped to finish without killing the Jeep—or one another. My teammate, Jaclyn Trop, is an auto reporter who reviews luxury cars, but we both quickly realized that her professional expertise didn't translate into real-world driving and car maintenance knowledge. While she knows her way around a racetrack, she didn't know how to read a map.

Naïve enthusiasm seemed like a perfectly legitimate qualification to enter a highly-detailed endurance event requiring a complex Venn diagram of skills I didn't possess.

Not that I know anything about cars. I can sort of drive a stick shift, and sort of change a tire. I'd signed up for the Rebelle Rally because tooling around isolated Southwestern back roads is one of my all-time favorite activities, something I discovered during the six years I lived in Far West Texas. (Aimless desert driving is terrible for the environment, but good for the soul.)

At first, my lack of experience didn't faze me. Naïve enthusiasm seemed like a perfectly legitimate qualification to enter a highly-detailed endurance event requiring a complex Venn diagram of skills I didn't possess. This blind optimism buoyed me for months: the Rebelle was just a crazy-sounding adventure, far off in the distance, something to think about later.

But six weeks before the rally, during a training weekend with a handful of other competitors in California's Borrego Springs, my optimism cratered into a black hole of fear and self-loathing. Surrounded by women far more experienced than me, all of whom could probably MacGuyver a tire blowout with a piece of gum, my lack of preparation smacked me in the face. Latitude and longitude felt like a maddening mathematical language I'd never master, and I didn't believe that Jaclyn or I would have the stamina and resilience to handle potential crises. (I live in Brooklyn! I don't even have a car!) Instead of bonding with the other participants, I disappeared into my tent, clutching my iPhone for comfort. Miller stopped by: "You okay?" she called from outside my tent. "Yeah," I squeaked. "Just tired." This is going to be a disaster, I told myself. You didn't think this through.

Mood for most of the week.

Rebelle Rally

I was certain the rally would bring out my worst self. I'd be a dehydrated raw bundle of neuroses, throwing my helmet in the dust and indulging in nonstop Carrie Mathison-like angry-crying. I spent the month before the rally nursing a never-ending migraine, holing up at home ruminating on my certain failure, and having bouts of ill-advised anxiety sex with a highly inappropriate partner I thought I'd successfully sworn off months before.

"It's only overwhelming because you've never done it before," my mother, always a voice of reason, said. "Once you're there, you'll get in the swing of it. You'll be fine. You always are."

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The rally began on a Saturday morning in early October, but Jaclyn and I arrived in Lake Tahoe—bright and sunny and permeated with the smell of pine—on Tuesday night to prepare. Buying our required provisions took an entire day: We'd need a five-gallon jug of water, emergency blankets, a fire extinguisher, first aid kits, food to last at least five days (in case something went terribly awry), a laundry list of auto supplies, and helmets—required for safety's sake whenever we were on the Rebelle course—that squished our faces into chipmunk-cheek blobs. Thursday was "technical inspection," during which rally staffers ensured each vehicle was properly equipped. On Friday afternoon, all 36 teams caravanned out to our first base camp, a sprawling settlement a few hours east of Lake Tahoe, with a vehicle impound, a maintenance tent and gas refill area, a food truck manned by a Michelin-starred chef, and the main gathering space—a shelter filled with tables and butterfly chairs, decorated with gauzy curtains and wildflowers.

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Miller briefs competitors; a green checkpoint on the course; Rebelle cars on a dry lake bed in California.

Paolo Baraldi; Whitney Joiner; Nicole Dreon

I woke on Saturday at 4:30 a.m. and launched into what would become my daily routine: wiggling into my Rebelle uniform (sports bra, tank top, long-sleeved shirt, hiking pants, lace-up canvas boots), rushing to the portable bathrooms to brush my teeth and splash water on my face; running back to pack up camp. While I dragged our gear down to the Jeep, Jaclyn picked up the day's list of coordinates and started plotting. I joined her under the main tent, staring helplessly down at the table where she'd spread the coordinate list, colored pencils, and distance-measuring rulers.

We experienced the singular thrill of spotting a green checkpoint: a mix of relief, pride, and elation that never got old.

Jaclyn understood latitude and longitude in a way I didn't, so it was obvious that she'd be the navigator, while I'd drive. We crept up to the starting line, my heart beating wildly from nerves, and waited to be let loose into the desert. (To discourage blindly following other competitors, teams were given different sets of checkpoints, and cars set off at two-minute intervals.)

"Turn left," Jaclyn said once we set off. "Our first checkpoint should be in 13 miles." A few minutes later, we experienced the singular thrill of spotting a green checkpoint for the first time: a mix of relief, pride, and elation that never got old.

Jaclyn in a Nevada ghost town, planning our next move.

Nicole Dreon

Later that afternoon, after meandering through a maze of dirt roads, we turned into a wide canyon, shot through with dry washes (empty creek beds that can easily be mistaken for trails or roads). "Should we be in four-wheel drive?" Jaclyn asked. Four-wheel drive gives you extra traction; it's used for rougher, rockier terrain. I felt silly for still being in 2WD—the everyday, highway-driving gear—and jerked the gear shaft up. We slowly rambled through the canyon down to a lake, where we found our final green checkpoint of the day.

We hit our tracker—sending our coordinates to staff at base camp, who monitored each vehicle, just blinking blips, on a GPS system—then realized that we'd fallen behind the other competitors. We could only see one team, off in the distance in a huge pickup. We watched as they scaled an incline effortlessly, as if filming a car commercial.

"If they can do it, so can we," I said, hitting the accelerator and heading up the incline. Within 30 seconds, our tires started to spin. Day one, and we were already stuck. We grabbed shovels from the back of the Jeep and started clearing dirt from underneath the tires. Nearby, a rally staffer pulled up in a pickup.

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"Are you in four-wheel drive?" he asked.

"Of course," I answered.

"You sure?" he said. "I'm not supposed to help you, but…you might want to check."

We climbed back inside the Jeep: the gear shift looked likeit was in the right place. Jaclyn pulled the manual out of the glove compartment. "It says we should see a 4WD light on the dashboard. Do you see it?"

"Oh," I said. "No." Hours spent crawling over boulders and sharp rocks, and we'd been in the wrong gear the whole time, an embarrassingly amateur mistake. We pledged not to tell anyone back at base camp.

Day One: stuck. (I promise this was steep IRL.)

Paolo Baraldi

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By day four, we'd improved dramatically. We knew when we were and weren't in four-wheel drive. We knew that our odometer was off, making precise calculations nearly impossible—a significant drawback. And we knew that spotting a particular road on our topo map didn't mean we could match it to one on the ground. What looked like a road on the map could be a dry wash; what looked like a dry wash on the ground could be a road. We constantly scouted the horizon for dust clouds, knowing they'd be from Rebelle cars, a sign that we were on the right track.

Then came our accidental vision quest in the Mojave, when we'd drifted so far off-course that we hadn't seen a friendly dust cloud for hours.

After mainlining the energy chews, we got out of the Jeep to scout. Jaclyn jumped on the hood to survey our surroundings; I took off by foot. A railroad crossed in front of us, with a steep drop-off underneath. We were definitely stuck.

Then I saw it: a campsite, off in the distance, across a weedy wash. Trucks! People! A dog! Life!

I found Mojave River Campgroundin miniscule print in the lower left-hand corner of the map. So that's where we were. "If we can get to that campground, we could find our way to the highway," I said. It wasn't our designated route back to base camp, but the sun was dropping by the minute.

The weedy wash was actually the Mojave River, according to the map. It wasn't a river so much as a morass of swampy vegetation with a lone, murky crossing. Back home in Brooklyn, in my haste to somewhat prepare, I'd watched a YouTube video of a Jeep wading through water. I knew it was possible; I just didn't know if I could do it. "No way," Jaclyn said. "We're not going to drown here."

"What if it's easier than it looks?" I argued.

Jaclyn thought for a minute. "What would Emily do?" she asked. Miller is a 5'1" blond powerhouse who gave decidedly non-cheesy pep talks every night that sometimes brought me to tears. I'd never met anyone who inspired such devotion and admiration, who made you want to succeed just to tell her you had. "If this was easy, everyone would do it," she told us repeatedly, and we felt like intrepid, ground-breaking explorers.

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Miller encouraged calculated risks. "Emily would try it," I said. "But I think she'd check the depth first."

I stripped off my boots, socks, and pants. In just a tank top and underwear, I splashed into the crossing, mud squishing beneath my toes. The water quickly came up past my knees. I pictured the Jeep filling up with contaminated river sludge while Jaclyn and I popped Klonopin and prayed that the satellite phone actually worked.

"If this was easy, everyone would do it," the Rebelle's founder told us repeatedly, and we felt like intrepid, ground-breaking explorers.

Okay, so we weren't going to ford the mighty Mojave. But at least now we knew where we were. (Another favorite Emily saying: "You're never as lost as you think you are.") From the map, the highway back to base camp was vaguely northeast; if we headed that direction, we'd surely find a way onto the road.

Two interminable hours later, we saw what we'd been looking for all afternoon: the day's final green flag, and behind it, the entrance to the highway. Our euphoric shouts were especially hard-earned this time. As we approached the highway, a car pulled up alongside us. "Thank God!" Shelley, a rally staffer, yelled out from the passenger seat of a broken-down '80s Jeep. "We found you!" Apparently, the staff back at base camp monitoring our blinking blip had become concerned: Where are they going?

"We thought we'd have to rescue you," her husband, Big Rich, called from the driver's seat. "But look: You rescued yourselves."

On the face of it, the day was a complete throwaway. Zero points. But we'd found our way out of the canyon, completely on our own.

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My month-long pre-rally panic, while overblown and unsubstantiated in retrospect, served a purpose: It burned out all my anxiety, leaving none for the actual rally. The meltdowns never came. I never threw my helmet in frustration. I didn't angry-cry nonstop. Jaclyn and I each had one brief tearful moment after making a dumb mistake—hers on day five; mine on day six—but we immediately pulled it together.

Rebelle Rally

As usual, my mother was right. Once I was forced to practice my fledgling skills, my fear melted away, replaced by an unabashed excitement that at times bordered on euphoria. Every moment brought something new: a stunning vista, a mountain pass, an abandoned ghost town, an expansive mesa. The entire course was on government property; these same roads were open to anyone. But they're rarely used, and it felt like we were seeing an America many never do, one hidden in plain sight.

I started to trust the Jeep more, and Jaclyn, and myself. One day we were caravanning along a high ridge outside of Joshua Tree, with steep drop-offs and hairpin turns. Wait! I thought, halfway through. I should be scared. If I turn the steering wheel just slightly, we'll sail off.I felt my stomach drop and panic rise up in my chest. But just as quickly, I reeled it back in. Don't let fear take over, I coached myself. You can stop it."You're already way more confident," Jaclyn noted as we dipped and swerved. "If we'd been on this road the first day, you would've freaked out the whole time. Now you're just trucking along."

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We were too clueless to be embarrassed about how little we knew.

I'd been so intimidated by the other competitors' credentials before the rally began, but now our lack of experience felt almost freeing. The rally was so out of our league that I was constantly astonished we were doing it at all. How we looked to anyone else didn't matter. We'd ask other Rebelles basic car-maintenance questions, knowing our queries probably sounded elementary. (Only one woman looked at us in disdain after we'd asked for her help installing high neon flags required for dune driving: "You actually don't know how to do this?" she spat. "Why are you even here?") We were too clueless to be embarrassed about how little we knew.

Every night, when the scores for the day were posted, we'd land in the bottom four. But we thought we were champions.

All week, the experienced competitors were itching for the final day, when we'd be competing in sand dunes—notoriously difficult to navigate. We woke up that last morning in California's Imperial Sand Dunes (where Return of the Jedi was partially filmed) to a blazing sun, a high in the 90s, and a range of shimmering white sand mountains towering over base camp.

I didn't feel particularly ambitious about the dunes, but Jaclyn wanted to attempt some final point-collecting. We caravanned with a few competitors, helping each other find the safest routes, then ate lunch around a green checkpoint, sitting in the shade cast by our vehicles. It was our last green of the rally.

But when I stood up, I saw the top of a blue flag in the recess of a group of dunes to the south. I nudged Jaclyn: "Let's try it."

Dunes: gorgeous and terrifying.

Paolo Baraldi

We carefully coasted down into the dune's recess by circling the perimeter, as we'd been taught, and clicked our tracker for the last time. The incline we'd just descended looked much higher than I expected, but it was still the easiest way out. I backed up a few feet to give us a running start, then slammed down the accelerator. Halfway up the incline, we felt our wheels spin, digging us into the sand below. We frantically tried to dig out, but as soon as we cleared a space, new sand spilled in.

Two of the Rebelles we'd teamed up with, Sedona and Maria, flew down into the recess, clicked their tracker at the blue flag, and zipped up the incline past us with no trouble. They parked on the dune's crest, then ran down to help dig us out. Finally we had enough room behind our back tires to position our MaxTrax, a pair of ridged, snowshoe-shaped rescue tools, behind our back tires. Slowly, carefully, we eased off the sand and onto the MaxTrax.

Many of my pre-rally fears came true. But I found an intoxicating freedom in taking on a challenge just to take it on, without expecting conventional success.

Sedona pointed out the angle she'd taken: "Back up even more, then punch the accelerator harder," she suggested.

I'd driven for 90 percent of the rally, but I didn't want to attempt the incline again. "I'm scared," I told Jaclyn.

We switched places and she revved the accelerator. Miraculously, she caught enough power to follow Sedona's route. We landed on top of the dune, tumbled out of the Jeep, and grabbed Sedona and Maria for a hug, jumping up and down, triumphant.

In the end, we tied for 29th place, fourth-to-last. And many of my pre-rally fears came true: We made careless mistakes and incorrect calculations; we were lost more often than not; we didn't know what we were doing most of the time. I just didn't react the way I'd assumed I would. Instead, I found an intoxicating freedom in being a complete novice, taking on a challenge just to take it on, without expecting conventional success. I'd never been more exhilarated to fail.

Finish-line euphoria.

Nicole Dreon

The second annual Rebelle Rally will be held from October 12-21, 2017. If you're interested in competing, find more information here.