Maria had organised to have today off, as well as yesterday, to ferry us around and decided to take us to Point Lobos. Thank goodness for that as it wasn’t on our itinerary and we would have otherwise missed this spectacularly beautiful place. As we approached it Maria told us to get ready to be blown away by coastal beauty. How right she was, I was completely blown away. It was sunny and clear as we approached but the sea fog rolled in as we parked the car and obliterated the view across the bay to Monterey. Maria was immediately apologetic but Disa & I were in raptures. The fog, as far as we were concerned, added to the beauty, concealing then revealing and generally creating wonderful scenes. Out came the cameras and many rather good photos were taken. We did several short but spectacular walks and encountered elephant seals and harbour seals lounging on rocks just off shore (but no sea otters), incredible layers of smooth sandstone alternated with pebbles (due to ancient mudslides), and orange lichen and Spanish moss growing on trees. Many people consider this to be the most beautiful meeting of sea and land in the world and I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, since seeing it to think of one more beautiful. It had one more delight in store for us. Disa had miscalculated on downloading Geocache sites and missed this area. However on one of the walks Maria said, on spying a tree stump that would be a good hiding place for a cache, looked inside and discovered a geocache! A special place indeed.
Onwards to Big Sur. We enjoyed the rugged cliff scenery, but I have to say that it wasn’t as good as the Tasman Peninsula, though it did have two very nice bridges, Bixby & Big Creek, both built in the 1930s. Still no sign of sea otters.
Next stop was Monterey. We walked Cannery Row (Note to self: must reread book of same name by John Steinbeck), a street of old fish & seafood canning factories that had its heyday in the 1930s but has since been gentrified and is now trendy eateries & shops. I liked it anyway, though we still didn’t spot any sea otters in the bay.
A late lunch at Phils (Maria please let me know if this is the wrong name) in Moss Landing. Very nice seafood, I had swordfish, Disa had salmon. Afterwards we discovered a crowd of noisy elephant seals (one with a radio transmitter on its head – must have been checking out the baseball scores) on the nearby wharf, but again no sea otters.
In search of sea otters, we headed to Santa Cruz wharf. We found tourists, trendy shops, seals, geocaches (so it wasn’t a total loss) and generally had a pleasant walk – but not sea otterrs. Consoled ourselves with an ice cream at Marianne’s. Disa used to eat ice cream here when she was a lass. Disa had pumpkin pie ice cream (I’m not making this up you know) and chocolate with peanut butter ripple. I had Oregon blackberry and a raspberry sorbet. Can’t remember what flavours Maria had.
Drove home via Mt Madonna and Disa & Maria broke into a hearty rendition of the Gilligan’s Island theme song at a particular corner of the road. I wasn’t too startled by this as Erik had told (warned?) me that this is what they used to do.
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