We are leaving our motel before 6:00 a.m. and taking advantage of the invitation to show up early at the Old Monterey Cafe. Barely light out, we are on the road and foregoing a return visit to Pacific Grove to look at the butterflies as we’ve decided to take the long way down while hoping that we won’t be so distracted that it will take all day to get home. You can see the ocean is a bit angry this morning as it leaps out of the sea and tries to attack our rental car. You might wonder why we had a rental car when we bought a new car not too long ago. It’s all about the math. If we are going on a trip of over 1,500 miles and you consider maintenance and depreciation costs of about $0.50 per mile, then this trip would have cost us about $750 in depreciation and extra maintenance costs. Instead, we rent this car for about $100 for the long weekend and don’t have all the wear and tear on the new one. Simple economics.
The heavy clouds have lifted, and the fog is burning off as we ask ourselves, “How’d it take two hours to drive only 65 miles so far?”
While we might need to make time, there’s always an extra moment to sit a minute and offer extra appreciation to Neptune for keeping his seas so beautiful for our enjoyment. Should you recognize that this isn’t the Big Sur Bakery, it was still closed as we passed, so our pitstop was in Gorda.
Sleeping next to mom and cozy in the sun. We just had to stop once more at the elephant seal colony to see the babies. But you can tell from the dearth of photos that we’ve not been stopping every 500 feet to ooh and aah.
The guardian male protects his harem by bellowing out his roar of dominance. Caroline can tell you that I make similar sounds as I bellow my dominance at home; I only wish I had his proboscis that would give me the deep resonance he’s able to effect.
It’s hard to say goodbye to the ocean.
Wow, these hills are most often brown. Pretty cool to see them in green.
Did I say something about saying bye to the ocean? Well, that was way up north near San Simeon; now that we are down here, south of Santa Barbara and not quite in Ventura yet, we could see that it was low tide, and at moments like this, we have to ask ourselves, “What’s more important, getting home at a reasonable time or checking out the tide pools?” Start the tide pool photos.
Because one can never have enough anemone photos, I present you with two more. One submerged.
And the other mostly out of the water but kept wet from the surf pulsing ashore.
My opinion is that Caroline looks beautiful walking in the shallow surf. Someday, I’m almost certain she’ll be able to walk on the surf.
We might want to stay for sunset, but that’s not in the cards. We still have about eight hours of driving left before we get home. No matter, though, as we agree that this 10th anniversary was probably the best 10th anniversary Caroline and I will ever experience.