Laguna Beach

The final destination of our trip was Laguna Beach, which is about an hour south of Los Angeles. We got to stay in at the home of one of Charles' college buddies who was away on family vacation that week. We were sad not to spend time with him and meet his family, but it was kind of a dream to have a beach house to ourselves for the week.






The house was adorable. Like many of the houses in Laguna Beach, they had their own botanical garden in the front yard, and beautifully groomed fruit trees in the back yard. One day after dinner Charles walked over to a tree and reached up to touch a ripe looking plum. The plum basically fell into his hand and we ate it- I'm telling you- we were in paradise.












One of my favorite parts of our stay there was their golden retriever Genevieve ("G") & cat Topanga. It felt so homey having a very affectionate dog, and pretty likable cat. (I don't typically like cats)


















The house was literally 2 blocks from the main street of Laguna, packed with cute shops, restaurants and art galleries. About a block and a half further and you were ocean side at a nice little (at least it was little when we were there) reef break. Charles surfed every day that we were in Laguna, getting up before the sun (and before me) and heading down the street. I surfed 2 days, not as comfortable surfing over rocks as he is.








This is one of the tide pools in Laguna Beach. The panorama is the view of the beach from the Brooks Street access (which is where we surfed).








The gratuitous self portrait beach picture is from the northern end of Laguna Beach.











Charles has another college friend who lives across the street from where we stayed, but unfortunately he was away in Iraq for most of the summer, so we spent a little time with his wife Sarah and newly adopted daughter Cora. Check out Cora's faux shoes in this picture. Every time we saw her she had on a different pair that color coordinated with her outfits. We're hoping to visit Laguna Beach again sometime soon in order to actually visit with Charles' friends (at least that will be the excuse we use)














We spent several days with Roger, who fits right in to the laid back southern California lifestyle. He and Charles even got to surf together one morning. We brought Roger to a barbecue at Sarah's house, and afterwards they were talking about fixing him up with a friend of theirs from church. What can we say, he's a likable guy.

















We also got to visit with my high school friend Dave, who somehow escaped without getting his picture taken. I'm not sure how I allowed that to happen. The only thing I can think of is that he visited both days after we had been biking in the Canyons and I was way too tired to think about a camera. It was great to catch up with him and remember why we had been such good friends.
Speaking about biking- Charles and I got to bike two days in Laguna Beach, both times we were able to ride from the house through the streets to the Canyon. Our first ride was a brutal climb up Laguna Canyon Road. We had to hike much of the climb up the sandy steep canyon road. The only redemptive fact of that climb was that we had a view of the ocean the entire time and a nice cool ocean breeze. When we were almost up the climb, Charles shocked me when he said we had to find another way to get down because this way was too steep to descend. I thought I was just struggling, but we spoke to bikers in town and they said that even the locals don't go that way because the climb is impossible. That made us feel better.

Our second ride was much longer. We started almost ocean side, and climbed on the streets up to 1000ft above sea level. Again, we had many views of the ocean as we climbed. Then we descended a really steep windy bumpy canyon road, which I tumbled down ending up underneath my bike. I was soaking wet from the climb, and then tumbled in dust, and by the time we finished our ride, we had to scrub my back with washcloth to get the dirt off it was so caked on. One guy we passed on our ride thought I had intentionally rolled in the dirt as a means of sunscreen. Hmm...right. We descended down to 200ft above sea level, and then climbed back up the other side. Altogether we probably climbed a total of 1800ft.

When we returned to Atlanta, all we could talk about for days was how we could get back to Laguna Beach, to visit, to live in a shack, whatever- just how can we get back to Paradise? Is it wrong to want to live somewhere just because it's beautiful? My heart longs to be by the ocean, but who knows if we will ever be able to.

Big Sur

After Napa Valley, we stayed in Santa Cruz so that we could start our journey down Big Sur in the morning. We found a very inexpensive family run National 9 Motel, where we found out what you get when you find a cheap hotel in California- beds that are more like wooden slabs than mattresses, and a shower that only dribbles out when you make it comfortably luke warm. Luckily, Charles and I would rather sacrifice comfort to save some money, so we'd probably both choose to stay there again.
This road sign showed us that we were already at the Pacific Coast of California. I had never been to California, and had only been to the Pacific ocean in Costa Rica. I thought that I would be disoriented with the ocean to my west, but for some reason (possibly all of these landlocked year in Atlanta) it made sense to me. My grandmother who lives at the Jersey shore visited California a few years ago and was always saying, then we went up to LA and down to San Francisco, because her body is accustomed to using the Atlantic Ocean to tell direction.

We had been told that you should really allow two days to drive Big Sur, if we were to really enjoy all of the views. We didn't want to spend the money to stay in one of the few very expensive coast-side hotels, so we decided to just start early and end late. Initially we stopped at every pull off, taking pictures and taking our time absorbing the views. Then at one of the stops Charles took this picture of me and we decided to take a picture of ourselves using the tripod. As soon as I started to close the car door, I sensed a problem and didn't push it shut all of the way. I grabbed at the door and yelled to Charles- you grabbed a car key, right? The car locked all of its door when you turned the ignition off, so here we were, pulled over to a look out spot somewhere in the middle of Big Sur locked out of our car. I got on the phone with AAA and started trying to flag people down, which wasn't easy at a small overlook because we didn't look stuck. Finally a refrigerator repair man turned around and pulled over and he and Charles managed to yank my partially closed door open and use some of the metal rods he had in his truck to press the unlock button. We never did take that picture of the two of us.
After that adventure, I strapped my keys to one hip and my phone to the other. It was to hard to trust that we would remember that the crazy rental car worked in reverse. Once on our way again, we passed a mile marker and realized that we had only gone about 70 miles in 4 hours, and had over 300 to go, so we needed to make better time. So we started doing what we called high speed landscape photography. The person in the passenger seat would roll down their window and shoot whenever the landscape looked good and the driver would call out things like "tree, tree, CLEARING!, guardrail, road sign, tree, hill, CLEARING!" so that the photographer would get the clearest shot possible. Then if the passenger thought that the area was nice enough, they would tell the driver to stop at the next overlook, and would trade roles. It was quite fun, and saved a lot of time stopping, although we ended up with quite a few guardrails and blurry trees in the foreground despite the drivers best efforts. This is an example of a high speed landscape photograph. (we're thinking about starting a new genre) Photographs- 35 mph or faster.
In retrospect, it might have been nice if we had taken more time absorbing the amazing beauty of the coast, but spending just the short time that we did observing it makes it seem more like an unobtainable mysterious place that I fell in love with. I think the most stunning part about the coast, being from the east coast, was how uninhabited and wild the coast still seemed. Show me one part of the Jersey shore that doesn't have paid access to the public beach, etc. The other aspect (as you can see from these pictures) is the steep cliffs that ran along most of the northern coast.