Vertigo
Last night, I rented the classic Alfred Hitchcock film "Vertigo." This was my first time seeing "Vertigo", and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The best part of the film is inclusion of dozens of famous locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. But I was most surprised to see the story end in San Juan Bautista, the town where I went to elementary school. San Juan Bautista is a very small town located between Gilroy and Hollister. But even more amazing was the footage of the main characters driving through a grove of eucalyptus trees, popularly referred to as the "Avenue of the Trees" (Google Maps), located on Highway 101 only a couple of miles from my family's home in Aromas. Very few people have heard of Aromas, even among those living in Monterey County; so, it's wonderful to know that Hitchcock chose to feature this relatively unknown area in his film. Consider that the film was made before Highway 101 existed. San Juan Bautista was reached by traveling on the two-lane State Route 82. The eucalyptus trees give the impression of driving through a tunnel - perpetually dark, eerie, and are in strong contrast to the barren, rolling hills that pervade the area. I completely understand why Hitchcock chose to include them in the film.
An inaccuracy in the route traveled is that the grove doesn't lie on the route from San Francisco to San Juan Bautista; the grove lies about 1 mile beyond the Highway 156 cut-off for San Juan Bautista and Hollister. The grove lies on the Highway 101 route to Monterey or Salinas in the South.