Wild life

I woke up early this morning hoping that the fog had decided to move on from Carmel, but alas it had decided to make itself at home for the foreseeable next few hours, and so we named it Carmel-by-the-Fog instead. It was still beautiful - like a cute European ski resort town, especially in the fog. We got up and ate our breakfast - provided by the hotel in an esky at our door - then checked out after meeting the American couple in the 4WD parked next to us who loved our accents. The guy normally lived in the middle of whoop whoop in Alaska designing missiles. Something different...

So with Carmel behind us, we drove on to Point Lobos State Park, a park which kept putting the song La Bamba in my head, but Los Lobos were nowhere to be found here. Instead, we found a heap of sea lions! We parked our car and went for a walk along the spectacular rocky coastline along to a heap of rocks where we could hear the sea lions - lucky we took photos because I had left my glasses in the car and Ryan's eyes are as bad as mine so we assumed the sea lions we could hear were on the other side of the rocks, but on closer inspection of our photos they had in fact been right in front of us! So we walked around the State Park for a while - it was still so foggy and pretty chilly, so at times it looked and felt more like the coast of Ireland than California. Lucky Ryan utilised his Bear Gryll skills and managed to track down some water in what was a forbidding environment.

We then headed off to Big Sur, a stunning stretch on the central California coast where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean. I had booked us in for lunch at a place I found online, called Post Ranch Inn, which had stunning vistas. I had been looking to this for ages, because although the hotel rates were exorbitant, the meal rates were pretty reasonable with the exchange rates. Unfortunately the fog was even thicker in Big Sur than in Carmel! So the view was not quite what we had hoped for, but the meal was great anyway, plus we had some dude park our convertible for us about 7 metres from where we pulled up. Such a silly system, but hey that's how the rich yanks roll.

We then headed onwards, along a magnificent coastline which was still beautiful in the fog! The sun managed to poke its head at out times so we popped the top down for a wee while. What a stunning piece of road though - if ever you are in the area, do this drive! Just north of Cambria where we were staying the night, we came across a crowd a heap of elephant seals! Ginormous lazy old things - most were huddled together for some reason, because the volunteer guide there told us they were trying to cool off! There were so many I doubt I will ever see more elephant seals in one area again.

Eventually we ended up in Cambria, a small seaside town smack bang in between San Fran and LA. We checked into the Sea Otter Inn where only a road separated us from the water, and went in search of sea otters. No luck on that front, but we did see heaps of bird and wild rabbits and squirrels! So we walked the length of the boardwalk, which was a bit longer than I'd expected, mainly because it was about 10 degrees colder than I expected, and found the "main drag". Along the way we had noticed that every hotel had some weird character dressed up out the front of it, which made sense once we got to the "main drag" and learned it was the Scarecrow festival!

So we wandered around the main town and eventually stopped in at a bar and grill, surprise surprise, for a drink. After discovering it was a pretty sleepy old town we headed back to our hood via the Moonstone Beach Bar and Grill. I wasn't overly hungry so had a "1st course" of shrimp and scallops which was HUGE! And Ryan had a New York steak which was also HUGE. We both ate all of ours. Oh dear. Well this trip was never for health purposes.

So then we just went back to the hotel for more blogging and a nightcap of one of our Sonoma wine hauls.