We lingered in the pleasant surroundings until afternoon of the following day, making an easy and eventless run to Stockton for the night. We had seen enough of forced schedules and long hours to determine us to make the run to Los Angeles by easier stages. Leaving Stockton in the late forenoon, we soon reached the little city of Modesto, which hopes some day to be the official gateway of Yosemite. Perhaps it was in anticipation of this distinction that two immense hotels, the Modesto and the Hughson, seemingly out of all proportion to any possible need, were being built. The former was practically completed, a seven-story concrete structure with all modern hotel improvements and conveniences, including ballroom, roof garden, and swimming pool. The Hughson was even larger and we could not help wondering if the hotel business in Modesto were not in danger of being slightly overdone.
At Merced we found another handsome new hotel, the Capitan, which would be a credit to a city with several times Merced's four or five thousand people, but perhaps the Yosemite traffic justifies the enterprise of the builders. We paused here for lunch and I was greatly amused at a conversation which I overheard in the lobby, illustrating the effect of the California microbe upon so many visiting Easterners. A gentleman wearing a light summer suit, a white hat and white shoes, and carrying a camera and golf bag—the very personification of a man who was enjoying life to the limit—was just leaving for the train.
"Well," queried a friend who met him, "are you about ready to go back to Peoria?"
"Go back to Peoria!—go back to Peoria!! I'm never going back to Peoria if I live a hundred years. Say, do you know that I wouldn't take all the Eastern States as a gift if I had to live in 'em, after having lived in California?"
A straight, level road runs from Merced to Fresno on the south, one of the finest links of the inland route of the new state highway. We found much of it under construction at the time and in passing around through the wheatfields we struck some of the deepest dust and roughest running that we found anywhere. We made up for it when we came back into the finished portion, which extended for several miles north of Fresno. It is a perfect road—concrete with a "carpet" of crushed stone and asphaltum rolled as smooth and hard as polished slate. It runs for miles through wheatfields, whose magnitude may be judged from the fact that we saw a dozen ten-mule teams ploughing one tract. Near Fresno we ran into the endless vineyards which surround the raisin town and which looked green and prosperous, despite the drouth which had nearly ruined the wheat. The raisin crop is one of Fresno County's greatest sources of wealth, netting the growers over five million dollars yearly. The abundant sunshine makes the grapes too sweet for light wines, though there were several wineries producing the heavier quality, which was mostly shipped to Europe, where it was blended with lighter wine and sent back strictly an "imported product." This practice, of course, became obsolete with the advent of prohibition, but the Fresno growers, as is the case everywhere, are now reaping the greatest profits in their history.
Fresno, with a population of nearly fifty thousand, has quadrupled in size in the last twenty years. It is thoroughly metropolitan in appearance and in public and private improvements. The Hotel Fresno is an immense fireproof structure of marble and concrete that will compare favorably with the best hotels in many cities ten times as large as Fresno, and here on our first visit we proposed to stop for the night, but changed our plan when we found that a road out of the town crosses the mountain ranges to the sea. We had not forgotten our failure to see San Antonio and La Purisima on our upward trek—and determined to seize the opportunity to get back to the coast. Paso Robles seemed the only satisfactory stopping place for the following night, but if we stayed in Fresno we could hardly hope to reach the "Pass of the Oaks" the next day. The road cuts squarely across the desert to Coalinga and we found ourselves wondering what kind of accommodations we should find at Coalinga. A garage man said he had been there once—a place of five hundred people, he guessed, and there was a pretty good boarding-house down by the depot. Not a very attractive prospect, to be sure, but Coalinga was the only town between Fresno and the mountains. It was some sixty miles distant, and by hitting a lively pace we could reach it by dark—if we had no ill luck.
For ten miles out of Fresno we followed Palm Drive—a splendid boulevard between rows of stately palms, the largest we had seen in California. At the end of the drive we turned sharply to the left following an unimproved road into the desert. This road is as level as a floor—a perfect boulevard in dry weather—though abandoned ruts indicated pretty heavy work after the infrequent rains. For the entire distance there was little variation; about midway we came to a green belt of pastures and trees along Kings River, and a new railroad was being built through this section. A native at a little wayside store—the only station on the way—told us that this desert land, counted worthless a few years ago, was now worth as much as twenty-five dollars per acre and that it was all capable of being farmed. It certainly did not look so; a white, alkali-frosted plain tufted with greasewood and teeming with jack-rabbits stretched away to distant hills on either side. The road meandered onward at its own sweet will and when it became too rough or dusty in spots it was only necessary to take another tack to have an entirely new boulevard. We did some lively going over the hard, smooth surface, which made forty miles seem a fairly moderate pace, but we were at a sore loss when we came to a branch road in the middle of the plain, with nothing to indicate which led to our destination. We had just decided to take the wrong one when an auto hove into sight and we paused to inquire.
"Straight ahead on the road, my brother; you can't miss it now and when you get to Coalinga go to Smith's garage, and God bless you."
We concluded that we must have run across a peripatetic evangelist, but when we went to Smith's garage—only it wasn't Smith's—after dinner to get an article from the car, we found our pious friend manager of the place.
As we came near the range of brown hills beneath which the town lies, we saw a row of oil-derricks running for miles along the side of the valley, for here is the greatest oil-producing section of California. The oil fields have made Coalinga, which we were surprised and pleased to find a live-looking town of several thousand people, with an excellent modern hotel quite the equal of the best country town hostelries.