USA: Hwy-101 South: Big Sur

[posted by Kizzy]

San Francisco was great and from here it gets better. Someone we met in Eureka said that for him things only got worst after San Francisco. You know, every experience is different!

On leaving San Francisco we wanted to get into Hwy-1 and follow the route along the coast to the popular beach resort and college town of Santa Cruz, but our GPS was intent on taking us inland via Hwy-101. So we missed a few things along the Pacific route.

Our master-plan was to originally stay in Santa Cruz, as we'd heard so many good things about it but on getting there we found it too busy and overpriced. We then ventured a bit further South and stayed for the next five nights in the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. From here we took on to exploring the affluent Monterey Peninsula.


The big surprise about Carmel is that Clint Eastwood served as a Mayor here and owns the Carmel Mission Ranch resort. He also used to own a pub-restaurant called Hog's Breath Inn - his photo still displayed at the entrance. 'His omnipresence' can be felt all around the town.

In Carmel we could not find accommodation for the 5 nights straight, there was a big Catholic convention taking place and most rooms were taken. But with the help of the local visitor's centre we took to finding a different room almost every day and taking advantage of the discount rates for late arrivals. It was funny up to a point. We stayed in the Dolphin Inn, the Svensgard Inn and the Hofsas House. We pretty much visited every inn in town. If you ever decide to visit Carmel we can give some advice on where to stay.

One of the many inns we visited

The visitor's centre offered one of these booklets guide with a self-guided walk of Carmel. We took on the challenge, which was fun and easily done and it gave us a good feel for the place.  We had the feeling we were being given exclusive access to a very 'special world' - as our guide book describes well 'an archly conservative and contrivedly quaint community'.

Carmel is small but very affluent with art galleries dotted around every corner.  The town is as safe as they come, you can walk until the late hours of the morning without being disturbed. There are no street lights, and no house numbers. Everyone is nice, you get good restaurants, a beach at your doorstep....

We could definitely see the charm but we felt, not our cup of tea. We found it a bit hard to get to the other layer, we couldn't get past the surface glitz. Having said that the landscape here is amazing and just three miles south of Carmel Mission, is Point Lobos State Reserve.

Spot the Harbor Seal

 

You can see how the erosion from the water created some very interesting sculptures and shapes on the land...

Here you will also find the few remaining groves of native Monterey Cypress, gnarled and bent by the often stormy coastal weather. It's beautiful...

Whilst in Carmel, we returned to Santa Cruz for a day visit. We were a bit disappointed as we felt all there is to do really is to visit the Boardwalk amusement park. It does hold the oldest surviving wooden roller coaster on the West Coast but we did not feel inclined to try it.

Every experience is different, and we're sure there's more to it. We did not spend much time here, a walk by the beach front. To be fair we just ticked the box.

The real highlight for us was in Monterey, where we followed the walk along the water to Cannery Row and visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

En route we saw this pelican posing, and we could not miss the opportunity of taking a photo. It's a theme of our travels to spontaneously come across wild life...

Col was really impressed with this bike, he felt it deserved a photo

The  Aquarium is rated by many as the best in the world and we were strongly advised at various points in our route that this was not to be missed. And we agree, it was worth every penny!

The jelly fish exhibition

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The sea horse exhibition was one of our favourites, we were in awe of the variety and complexity of these creatures....

Is it or is it not?

Yes it is a seahorse

As we were leaving Cannery Row we came across this poem by John Steinbeck. Col has read some Steinbeck books but there is one he has not read named after this area which we assume the poem below is a part of. It reflects the feeling of the area as a working fishing and cannery port. It retains very little of this time nowadays.

After our over-extended stay in Carmel we took the breathtaking drive through Big Sur, stretching 90 miles south of Carmel from Point Lobos all the way to Hearst Castle with 5,000-foot-tall mountains rising from the Pacific Ocean.

For us this is the high point of the South California trip. We could post endless photos of how beautiful this coast is. We stopped almost every 5 minutes to capture some of the views we were blessed with. And world like God or miracle do come to mind when in the presence of such 'heavenly sculpted' landscape...

Every now and then you see the crazy cyclists going up and down the hills. We do admire them and their 'stamina', and each time we turn the corner we pray that they're wearing bright colours, they're properly signaled and, ultimately that we don't kill any.

The image of the RV's is also a regular in our trip, there are so many of them taking on the roads...

We made a stop at Pfeiffer Beach, properly labelled Big Sur's best beach. The water is too cold for swimming but we enjoyed a nice beach combing stroll and watched intently as families arrived and made alternative uses of the beach other than swimming...

Yes this little snake was there too!

A family enjoying the view

Following our travel guide book we made a stop to recharge our fuels at Nepenthe, one of the most popular and long-lived stopping points along the Big Sur Coast. It is a rustic bar and restaurant that offers good food but it's the view you come here for.

View from the restaurant

We read of this hotel nearby, the Post Ranch Inn, a luxury resort hanging high above the Big Sur, said to be at the forefront of ecoturism - designed to be virtually invisible from land or sea. They run daily tours at 1400 but we missed it. And they were pretty full that day so could not accommodate for our particular late schedule.

We made haste. Our next stop was at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. Where we followed a short trail leading to a slender waterfall. This is the only waterfall in California that plunges directly into the Pacific.

A look to the miles travelled

We had to cross this tunnel to get to the trail

We wished we could create a magic pathway so that we could go down and swim on that turquoise-blue cove.

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Our Big Sur adventure was coming to an end, the mountains were flattening out and turn inland, and the coastline becoming, open-range ranch land.

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Col focusing on the task ahead

Tom Tom the faithfull navigator

65 miles south of the Big Sur Village, we stopped at Hearst Castle - designed by architect Julia Morgan for William Randolph Hearst, an American newspaper magnate and leading newspaper publisher who died in 1951. We didn't have tickets to visit the castle, you need to book well in advance, so we visited the museum. You can extrapolate  from the many photos and records on display what it is like. It was a shame we didn't see it, it took the man a good 30 years of his life to get close to finish...

Opposite the castle it's Hearst Beach, where you can see the big pier Hearst ordered to be constructed so that the materials for his castle could be delivered...

We had a good look for rooms to stay but they were so expensive and didn't deliver on quality, so we camped in San Simeon for the night. Our last camping adventure in the U.S.A.

Hwy-1 took us almost straight to Santa Barbara via the sleepy and still-agricultural Guadalupe, where we stopped for lunch at the Far Western Tavern. Truly a stop in time. Almost the whole setting was kept exactly as it was when it first opened in the late 1950s.

Not far off we saw this mural and we both felt that it  said something about America and C
alifornia that we can't express in words.....

The drive to Santa Barbara and also from Santa Barbara to L.A was punctuated with curious images of bells along the highway that mark the original 'El Camino Real'. This route, also known as the King's Highway, links together a number religious missions established between 1769 and 1776 by a handful of Spaniards and Mexicans whilst the American colonies were busy rebelling against the English crown.

The Southern California of our imagination we found it in Santa Barbara: finally the sun, the beaches, the palm trees and the laid back atmosphere... At this point, we're about 1 hour from L.A. We stayed here for something like 4 days to update the blog and prepare for L.A

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Santa Barbara looks like a Mediterranean village, with its Spanish style architecture.

Every now and then, you see the funky work of some artist, inviting you to make your own interpretations

We liked what we saw of Santa Barbara. Our stay here was literally work, so there's not much in the way of photos because we were not out much. We had a few days left before arriving to L.A and consequently Costa Rica, so we had a fair bit of things to sort out: photocopying documents, sorting out medications, emailing family, updating the blog.... And it was good here because we had all the services we needed within close distance, we still had the car and we had a good wireless connection. We had a bit of time to catch-up with our thoughts and talk about our expectations of the next leg of the journey.

Please click here to view the photo album - you will notice that the photos for this entry are also included in the California album.

A few thoughts
The American journey was coming to an end, maybe you sensed a rushed mood on this last entry. That's how we felt towards the end, a bit rushed. There were questions in the air, like, are there things we could have done better? Yes, there are. Did we enjoy it? We loved it. Would we have done it differently? Maybe, maybe not. Throughout the journey there were loads of people with bags of advice and there was plenty of information. It's was easy to get caught  up in trying to digest as much as possible in information, but ultimately you have to live it. At times we got distracted with the detail of planning. And if there was one thing that stayed with me was that it is hard to be in the moment. We are always either living in the past or in the future... what of the present?