This page documents the drive from Oakland to Los Angeles and back again for the Net.Marketing 1999 conference. Oakland to Los Angeles I left Oakland at about 6:45 in the morning. Around 9 a.m., I stopped for breakfast at McDonald's in a city named Coalinga. This photograph is taken outside of the McDonald's looking down the road. You can see that there is virtually nothing there. Behind me is the Harris Ranch steak house, which I highly recommend for an incredible steak. It is about midway between Los Angeles and San .Francisco. Harris Ranch is a very high end brand of organic beef, sold at a few supermarkets in the area. They are well known for their excellent beef, and this is there only restaurant (their farm must be nearby, because there is absolutely nothing else in the vicinity). The trip from Oakland to Los Angeles is mainly a five hour drive down Highway 5. This goes through the center of California, where all the farms are. The road is completely straight and there are vast stretches of absolutely nothing for hundreds of miles. One pleasant diversion along the trip are miles of these beautiful white flowered trees. I assume that they are some sort of fruit tree, though at the time there was no fruit on them. They remind me very much of the cherry blossom trees that one finds in Washington DC. and in San Francisco. After about five hours of driving South from Oakland, the end of the farming valley appears, in the form of a mountain range separating the farming valley from Los Angeles. The highway which crosses the mountain range goes to a high elevation of 4000 feet, and the drive is quite beautiful. After going up the mountain range very quickly, the descent is fairly gradual and the terrain changes several times. At times there are these interesting rolling hills with dents in them, other times there are short flat areas with no vegetation. After I came off the mountain range the car traffic became significantly more congested, and so I was not able to take any more photographs without endangering my life. :-) Los Angeles to Oakland More of the dramatic hills as you leave the Los Angeles basin. As I approach the edge of the Los Angeles basin, and head up the mountain range, I can see that clouds cover the entire farming valley that I will be driving on for the next four hours. The ride back from Los Angeles to Oakland was marked by dramatic sunlight filtering through the cloud cover. Interesting how the clouds lasted all the way from the age of the Los Angeles basin to the Bay Area, covering the entire eastern side of the mountains, but stopping immediately on the other side of the mountains. I could not resist taking a picture of this sign to Hanford, CA, because my wife's name is Jan Hanford. Other pages: Visit to Santa Monica. The Century Plaza hotel. Pictures at the Net.Marketing Convention.