It was a much more leisurely day. It was also a day of personal firsts. While I had been to the bay area many times, and to So Cal a few times, I had never been to the stretch in between at all. Therefore, my road trip foray into truly unexplored territory began first thing in the morning. The immediate question was what route to take.

I remembered an aquiantance from my college days; a guy named Clay Reynolds. Clay was a first year student in my incoming class. I never really got to know him all that well, but I remembered that he was from Salinas. I think he might have been the first Californian I ever met. So when I saw a highway sign on 101 pointing out the route to Salinas, that was good enough for me.

It was as good a route as any other: but the truth is that Salinas isn't really a tourist destination. It seems to be a fairly major agricultural town about an hour south of the bay. I stopped for coffee and gas. It does have this going for it: it's hot, as are all the big farming towns in California. But it's more-or-less open to Pacific breezes, with no pesky mountain ranges to block the wind. So you get this odd effect of high 90s temperatures broken frequently by nearly AC level bursts of cool air. Here's what Salinas looks like at 70mph while I'm enjoying one of those bursts of cool air. There was another upside: Salinas is the birthplace of John Steinbeck, who happens to be one of my favorite authors. So now I can say I've done that.

Salinas was the waypoint, the goal was the beautiful bayside tourist destination of Monterey. Steinbeck wrote one of his really famous novels, Cannery Row, about this town. Back in the days it was sort of the epicenter of the sardine processing industry in the whole Pacific US. Now we kind of snicker when we think about sardines.

A crush of humanity has descended on the towns surrounding the Monterey Bay for Labor Day weekend, so the traffic was intolerable. But after a frustrating bout with it, and a delicious kebab lunch at a local Persian place, I did a tour of the waterfront and the old cannery row.














The only thing they net for cannery rown any more is tourists. The local signage all says the sardine population was overfished. I dunno...I wonder if we just didn't all collectively decide we like fresh fish better.

Monterey is also big for wildlife, with the marine wildlife getting top billing. Consider, for example, this harbor seal. Note also the less well regarded harbor squirrel, who must console his sense of rejection with the lovely nut he found to munch on while I took his picture.

South of Monterey is the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, perhaps the only town outside of England to have a snooty hyphenated name. Once upon a time Clint Eastwood was mayor here. My Lonely Planet USA guide says that if you see only one Mission in California, you should see this one. So I tried to. But I couldn't find parking so I gave up. See my previous comment about the crush of humanity. But they seem to have a nice beach, anyway.

But I was eager to get on with the real objective of the day. The Pacific Coast Highway has been a source of intrigue to me for years. Finally, it had all come together. I had the time to enjoy it, the car to drive, and the perfect top down weather. There aren't really enough superlatives available in the English language for this drive. Each hairpin turn of the twisty road opens up new vistas, seemingly more mind-boggling and scenic than the last. Here's a small sample, I'll post more on Facebook, which is better at dealing with photos than this blog is.

It actually presented an interesting problem. The PCH is very windy and fairly slow. It takes a pretty long while to drive it's length. This only gets longer if you actually stop to admire every breathtaking view. After the 20th one or so, you might start to get jaded. And you certainly won't get to wherever you're heading on time even if you don't. I eventually made a deal with myself: after stopping at one overlook, I would stop at another until the surrounding terrain (the hills, cliff faces, and landmarks) had actually changed and the old ones were no longer visible. It occurred to me that a lifetime of experiencing every possible vista might well be a life well-lived. But it's not the life for me. I want to get this gist of the great things, and them move on.

Moving on, in my case today, was the my current stopping point of San Luis Obispo. A small but very pleasant little town that sort of marks the northernmost outpost of Southern California. I met a nice couple in a restaurant here, Lee and David. She's from New Zealand, he's from England. They live in Brisbane now, but they have just begun a two week vacation that will take them up to Yosemite. We compared roadtrip notes. I'll be out longer, but they have further to go in order to get home. A lovely conversation was had with two perfect strangers. I hope that there are many more such encounters waiting for me the rest of the way.

Tomorrow: Ventura county in the sunshine