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.