The last time I was on HWY 1 I was with my dad and possibly my sister....though I don't entirely remember her being there. All the same I have little, if any memory of it. So when work decided that I needed to go to a conference in Anaheim (near Disneyland), Igor decided he wanted to come with me and for kicks we would drive the long way down!
I rented a car and we loaded it up, not so early on Saturday morning with no particular plan in mind (I'm working hard a getting better at this). We put the rubber to the road around 11 AM and headed over the bridge into San Francisco, our first stop the sunny beach city of Santa Cruz.
One interesting fact about finding the route down HWY 1 is that, despite my best efforts I could not get google maps or the waze app to take me that route or even give me that option. I guess that just goes to show you that technology is no real substitute for a map.
We made it to Santa Cruz around 1PM and found a parking spot about 5 minutes walk from the Board Walk. Since our trip down to San Diego a couple of months ago Igor has been really wanting to go running on the beach again. Something about the sand under his feet and the beauty of the ocean means freedom and he loves it. So avoiding the participants of the Ironman competition that was still underway Igor handed me his sandles and away he went running down the beach. I decided that a lovely stroll was a better way to enjoy the warm day and so took my time walking in the wet sand and letting the waves lap at my feet.
Eventually we met back up and got back on the road. Our next stop, Monterey! Initially we thought that maybe we would check out the aquarium but when we arrived at about 3:00 in the afternoon we though the better of it for this trip as we still needed to make it quite a bit further along the road before finding a place to sleep that night. So in Monterey we found a cute little café market place and had a nice, hot, and pretty late lunch, complete with hot chocolate and coffee for the road. :)
 |
| Monterey Hot Chocolate in Hand |
We stopped a few more times along the highway to take some pictures and enjoy the scenery when it got more dramatic. Even decided to be daring enough to climb down a small part of a kind of precarious cliff to take some pictures.
As you all know, I am not the most spontaneous of people, though I am trying to enjoy the unknown a little more. On this trip I decided to embrace it and didn't make any reservations to stay anywhere for the first two nights while we drove down the coast.
When it was getting late and time for us to start looking for a place to stay for the night the discomfort of not knowing was eking in on me a bit. We passed through Big Sur and south all the camp grounds (and there were quite a few) had signs posted out front "FULL." So with the sun setting, Igor and I stopped the car and went down to the beach at the side of the road to enjoy the sunset. Igor found a nice spot where he wanted to camp for the night and I, of course got nervous about the fact that we probably weren't allowed to stay there. I still don't know if it's legal or not, even after conducting some research online.
We drove a little further down the road to get some water and discuss what to do a little more. We stopped a very nice little camp ground that of course was full and filled up our water bottles for the night. Igor could tell that I was growing more uncomfortable with our beach sleeping plan so he decided to go ask some people if instead we could share their camp site. The first couple he asked said "of course!" and we ended up having a wonderful evening and morning with them. They even had extra food that they shared with us and some fun stories about their camping experiences up in Weaver, Ca, complete with potential sasquatch characters!
 |
| Jerry & Sabrina, our camp site saviours |
No comments:
Post a Comment