You’re never finished exploring California. It has something for everyone, and no one gets to just be a passenger.

On a return trip from Piute Pass, Vivek and Aniruddh enjoyed the view of limitless road, blue sky, and distant mountain.

The theory is that it’s distracting to hold a phone and drive with just one hand. But a large body of research now shows that a hands-free phone poses no less danger than a hand-held one — that the problem is not your hands but your brain.

“It’s not that your hands aren’t on the wheel,” said David Strayer, director of the Applied Cognition Laboratory at the University of Utah and a leading researcher on cellphone safety. “It’s that your mind is not on the road.”

Signal when merging. It makes life safer for all of us.