California Journal

Ron and I traveled to California for a business trip. We flew into Oakland, drove to Sacremento for a factory tour of a new vendor, then drove back to San Franscisco to the Golden Gate Bridge. Then drove down south along Highway 1. This is a trip that most people take a week or two to drive and enjoy the scenery. Because of our work schedule, we had two days, which was reduced to only 1 1/2 days because of the plant tour.

The Golden Gate Bridge

We finally got to the bridge about noon, we skipped by San Franscico. We really need to go back to visit San Franscisco, I hear it is a great place to spend some time. We drove until 5 pm. I was really tired and didn't know where the next town might be. We stopped at Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is a college, surfer town. This turned out to be not the best choice. The hotel was nice, the wharf was a nice little walk from the hotel. The dinner was nice enough. But the next morning, Ron woke up with a pretty bad stomach problem. He is sure he had food posioning. He will not be eating fish for quite some time.

The Sun Rise on the Pacific Coast! I wanted a hotel with a view of the sunset, well this town is in the Monterry Bay, on a little pennisula, so we actually had a view of the sunrise instead. That was a little confusing geographically.

The surfers stayed out until the sun went down and were headed back out when the sun was coming up.

The next morning, we headed out again. I quickly found out what was south of Santa Cruz.

Strawberry fields, artichoke fields, lettuce fields! I didn't stop and take pictures, but we could see the big beautiful strawberries from the highway. 

The town of Carmel and plenty of other really nice towns followed. Carmel is the town of Clint Eastwood. We should have stayed in Carmel. Ron really wished we would have stayed anywhere but where we were.

And such beautiful scenery. The town of Big Sur has some small hotels, and a thick forest of trees.

I don't know the difference between the seals and the sea lions, or mayb

e sea otters, but we first saw the mama and baby, then these beachs of beached seals, seal lions or whatever.

There were hundreds of them, just laying out resting!

We considered seeing the Hearst Castle. It sits high on the mountain top, overlooking the Pacific. It looks amazing, but it was getting late. There are a couple of lovely resort towns following this part of the drive, but we had to get on to our next meeing town, Rialto.

We flew into Oakland Wednesday night, drove to Scaremento that night, spent Thursday touring the plant, then driving until 5 pm. Friday, we woke up at 7:30 am and drove until 8 pm.

That is too much driving for one day.

By the way, if you want to drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, you might want to plan on doing that in the next few years. The highway is being washed down the mountains. There were several locations being rebuilt due to the rock slides.