Friday morning, time to head back home. We were going to spend our last night camping at El Capitan State Beach, near Santa Barbara. We stopped in Monterey for lunch and then headed down Pacific Coast Highway, planning to go through Big Sur. It was overcast and a little chilly. The car top was up, and we were all pretty quiet. A little tired from our trip, sad that our Spring Break was coming to an end, and knowing we would be back in school in a few days.

As we drove, we passed many people hitchhiking. As we came around a corner, there was a woman up ahead at the side of the road with her thumb out. And as we got closer, she was topless! “Stop the car!, Pull over!” Dave, Mike, and I yelled at Ralph. He just kept driving while we were at the windows trying to get a better look. “Why didn’t you stop to give her a ride?” I asked. Ralph replied, “If I had stopped, some of her hippie friends would have run out, jumped us, and stolen the car”. “No, I wasn’t going to do it”. I didn’t have my camera ready, so there is no proof that we had an encounter with a naked woman. The next few hours, we still kept complaining that Ralph had not stopped.

The campsite at El Capitan was nice. Nothing had spilled in the trailer, and the campsite was on level ground. It was a short walk to the beach. We went exploring after setting up camp. We cooked hamburgers for dinner that night and sat around the campfire talking about our trip. Deciding on what we would tell everyone we did on our Spring Break trip to be sure we all were saying the same thing. Tomorrow, we would be back home. Back to high school classes and planning for graduation. Back to working at the gas station. Back to serving food at HoJo’s.

We got going early the next morning. The trailer needed to be returned by 5:00 pm, and it was a two-hour drive home. We were pushing the trailer to hitch it up to the car when I heard glass break from the other side. I walked around to see what had happened. Ralph had put his hand through one of the windows. His hand was bleeding a lot. Ralph said, “Does it look bad?Mike grabbed a towel and wrapped his hand. Dave said, “We need to take him to the Emergency room”. So, we all got in the car, putting Ralph in the front seat, and headed to the ranger station at the camp exit. I stopped and asked the ranger where the closest hospital was. He looked in the car and saw Ralph holding his bandaged hand up. “Oh, that’s a lot of blood,” he said, looking away and giving us directions to a hospital in Goleta.

Now we’re flying down Pacific Coast Highway, headed towards the hospital in Goleta. We were trying to keep Ralph calm. He kept saying, “I hope I don’t get any blood on the car rug”. We finally got to the emergency room. Mike called Ralph’s dad to let him know what had happened and to get insurance information. There were only a few people waiting. A nurse took Ralph to look at his hand after waiting a few minutes. The three of us sat in the waiting room hoping it would not take too long. The only thing we could hear from the exam rooms was an old woman yelling, “But I don’t want an enema”.

Ralph came out with a bandaged hand, and we headed back to the campsite. We told Ralph to just sit in a chair while we finished hitching the trailer to the car. We didn’t want any additional accidents. All packed up and back in the car, we headed down Pacific Coast Highway again. Top down, radio blasting, wind blowing through our hair. Our Spring Break adventure was coming to an end.

We were back at the Enco gas station in a few hours. One of the mechanics at the gas station fixed the broken window and took the trailer back to the rental place. There were many stories (true and semi-true) that we would talk about for a long time. And if no one else, we believed we were four cool guys, at least for Spring Break in 1970.