Fifteen minutes from where all of this started, there is a boardwalk on the water at Newport with about forty boats tied up along it and a marine layer that usually hangs about until eleven.
Lido Marina Village spent a long time being nothing much — a slightly tired arcade of shops on the Lido Peninsula that everybody drove past on the way to the ferry. It got taken apart and put back together in the mid-2010s, and the version that exists now is extremely pleased with itself: good shops, better restaurants, and a boardwalk you can walk end to end in about four minutes.
We are aware that “redeveloped waterfront retail” is not a phrase that stirs the blood. Go at eight in the morning anyway.
Before the shops open it is just a working marina with very expensive scenery. Halyards ticking against aluminium masts, which is the best sound on the California coast and one you cannot get anywhere inland. Somebody hosing a deck. The particular flat grey light you only get under a marine layer, which photographs terribly and looks wonderful.
Bear State was born about twenty minutes down the coast from here. The landing page of this website has a lifeguard tower on it from a beach you can nearly see. The whole company came out of a specific idea about what Southern California mornings are for, and this is one of the places that idea came from.
Why we keep writing about mornings
Nine years of this journal, and looking back over it there is an embarrassing pattern. Huntington at 6:40. The Gaslamp at seven. Half Moon Bay in fog. A parking lot in Carson at nine on a Sunday. Now a marina at eight.
It is not really about the coffee. The coffee is the excuse to be somewhere at an hour when it belongs to almost nobody. Every one of these places is busy and ordinary by noon, and for about ninety minutes beforehand each of them is briefly, genuinely yours.
That is what the drink is for. Not the caffeine — the pretext.
Bring a thermos. Get there before the shops open. This works everywhere.