Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Highway 1 to Sunset Beach

Drove up Highway 1 from Morro Bay to Santa Cruz yesterday. Spectacular views of the Pacific, some literally under our wheels! The building of this highway was a huge engineering feat – in some places they have had to build bridges over gorges cutting way into the cliffs. Beautiful surf beaches, some of them completely deserted, due to the lack of accessibility. In other places, people were camped right on the beaches – seeing as we were booked into a State Beach Park that night we were a bit concerned about that. However when we arrived, Sunset Beach was a fair walking distance from our campground. It was freezing cold though – a week ago we were in Nevada and it was 116 when we arrived – last night as we were setting up it was in the low 60’s (below 20 for the metricated amongst us). So we were all digging into the travel bag with the thermals, jackets and hats in it, and searching for long pants and shoes and socks for the first time in 7 weeks. A bit of a shock to be out of our sandals.

A day in Santa Cruz today – a pretty little town with a boardwalk along the coast – which we avoided like the plague. After a day at Universal and Disney we are a bit roller-coasted out, and we headed to some other grease pit for lunch. Spent some time looking for a place to discard Laurie’s bike – he did one too many jumps on it, and the derailer got stuck in the back wheel, causing both to come adrift. But Santa Cruz has a place called the Bike Church, where old bikes get reconditioned and passed onto less fortunate people, so Laurie’s bike (or parts of it) will end its days cruising the streets of Santa Cruz. I don’t know what he is going to ride for the next two weeks – I guess we can hire him a bike in Yosemite and San Francisco, but it sort of simplifies things for our final stop over.

The other thing we planned to do here has also not come to fruition – we were planning to hire surf boards for the kids and go surfing off the coast here, but there is a hurricane in Maui at the moment, and the surf here is a complete no-go. Flat as a pancake – very little wind, and glassy. Not likely to improve until the tail end of the hurricane hits them here in a few days; unfortunately we can’t wait that long. They will just have to wait until we get back to Aus, and hire boards in Ocean Grove.

So traveling again tomorrow – Julian has been very unsettled here in Sunset Beach, so we will be pleased to be on our way again. Only two (maybe three – depends if we follow our plan B and go to Tahoe) more set ups and we will be headed back to New York. Mind you, we are enjoying the benefits of being in Southern California’s market garden area – buying freshly picked fruit at the side of the road each night, and scoffing it for dinner and breakfast. Will miss that. But it will be nice to have our own shower again, and our own washing machine – tired of Laundromats!

Next stop – Yosemite…

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