Before leaving San Clemente, we got coffee at Zebra with our friend who happens to be Sarah’s neighbor but is also in our nursing program. Then we got on the 1, heading north. (The 1 and at times, the 101, goes all along California’s coast. It’s the slower, more scenic way.) We walked down Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice Beach. Shop after shop was the coolest. I can’t think of any equivalent in Boston. Everyone was so beautiful, thin, and well-dressed. We got bagel sandwiches at Gjelina and a slice of salad pizza at Abbot Kinney Pizza Company. We visited one of Sarah’s friends at her flower shop Fleur in Santa Monica, and continued our way up through Malibu and Santa Barbara where we stopped for ice cream at McConnell’s: boysenberry rose milk jam, olive oil and salted almonds, Eureka lemon and marionberries, are you kidding me? (Our road trip was basically a food tour. As it should be.)
Next stop was in San Luis Obispo to the Madonna Inn to gawk at the fairy tale cottage-like interior and take a huge slice of pink champagne cake to go. We stopped for lunch at Kreuzberg before continuing north. We drove through Morro Bay and Cambria and stopped to see the elephant seals in San Simeon. They were huge, fat, and ugly lying on the beach and made a funny noise.
Today’s destination was Big Sur, the gorgeous mountainous coast that is cliffs with blue waters below. It was getting dark and we didn’t know where exactly we were camping. Sarah had camped in this area before, just parking and sleeping in sleeping bags between the road and the cliff’s edge, but we hadn’t see any area that allowed that and we didn’t want to set up camp in pitch blackness so we couldn’t drive for too much longer. I found a spot on freecampsites.net that wasn’t right on the water but was just off the 1 on the other side of the road. (Just an open area on the side of a dirt road.) It wasn’t bad. We pitched the tent and ate our cake. Falling asleep to the sound of elephant seals is a very unique experience.
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| Elephant seals |
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