Disclaimer: This post is one of those that ended up being written years after the experience was had. Sadly, there were no notes taken so whatever is shared here must be extracted from the images and what memories they may have lent us. Fortunately, there was an itinerary still in my directory of travel plans, so that will help with some details. As to why this wasn’t noted or blogged about, I was in the throes of writing/editing my book Stay In The Magic and felt that any other deep writing would derail that fragile effort.

If you’ve read the previous two travel posts that were titled “Forgotten…” you might have noticed that there was a Day Zero entry that this one is missing. Well, there wasn’t a single photo of our drive from Phoenix, Arizona, to Goleta, California, where we had booked a room at the Motel 6 on Calle Real.

The reason that I’m pointing out that we stayed on Calle Real is that right across the street was where we wanted to take the person traveling with us for breakfast, Backyard Bowls. We fell in love with their acai bowls and hot porridges on previous visits to our great aunt and uncle Burns, who lived right up the street.

We have 485 miles scheduled for today’s drive, but since most of it will be on Highway 1 and knowing how slow we will be, had we not staged ourselves on the north side of Los Angeles, we’d never get to Oregon. Not that we are going to arrive in Oregon at the end of this day but it is the main destination of this vacation.

With us is Caroline R. I’m leaving her relatively anonymous as she represents another friendship we wrecked. We were out here to share coastal Highway 1 with her since, if my memory serves me, she’d never been out on this stretch of scenic beauty. So, it was obligatory that we’d stop at a few key locations for her to visit the more iconic places, according to John and Caroline anyway.

The elephant seals are from a colony hanging out in the shadow of the closed Piedras Blancas Motel.

Maybe you are wondering now that I’ve baited you, how did we dash another friendship upon the rocks?  It was during this, our first trip with Caroline R., that we learned that we really weren’t compatible traveling with her, but a larger can of worms was looming on the horizon. We’d already invited her to join us on a whitewater trip into the Yukon and Alaska to raft the Alsek River the following summer, and it was at the end of that rafting trip that everything unraveled. After the Oregon trip, we tried, again and again, to let her know that it was okay if she felt like backing out of Alaska, but she never picked up on the clues, and we were too chickenshit to tell her that, while we loved meeting with her and her husband in Phoenix, we felt that traveling with her was unbearable to us. But why, John? For some people, it seems they are more comfortable sharing what they don’t like than what they do like. We, on the other hand, don’t need others to constantly point out where things could be better. Who cares about those details when you are where you are in the circumstances as they are?

That’s Caroline R. behind my Caroline W. One wants to have fun while the other has none.

Like all things, that too will pass; the clouds will clear, and we’ll take what we need from this trip. After all, our travels are about seeing the cup overflowing, as it’s never half full.

In the multi-verse of John, like two mirrors in a roadside bathroom, you can choose to see the version of your choice. If I’m just the simple reflection of surface John, I might have been wearing my Dumas persona (French spelling of Dumbass), but when you catch me about four layers deeper, there’s a different version, maybe the one Caroline fell in love with. That’s not an invitation for anyone else to fall in love with me, just me acknowledging that nobody ever really knows which version of a person they are looking at.

This version of Caroline is the anti-window one. You see (well, actually, you don’t), the Big Creek Bridge of Big Sur is right behind her. Most people want to capture the bridge; we’ve done that plenty of times, but I never can have enough of that smiling face.

You could ask Caroline at any time if she’s had enough of gazing out on a silvery ocean, and I can assure you she’d tell you, “Never!”

These sweets on display are not even my favorites from the Big Sur Bakery. I suppose a favorite hardly matters as the truth of it is I don’t care what I have from here because when we stop for a pastry and coffee, whatever we’re having is an instant favorite. Is it really all that special? Of course not, but the setting and the location make everything here absolutely amazing.

The trail to Garrapata Beach because we will “never” travel the Big Sur coast and not stop here unless the weather is so bad that we can’t be inconvenienced.

This is building up to be a perfect day.

These are the kind of bird photos I typically only get to shoot when in an aviary, my lucky day.

It might be difficult to see accurately in this photo, but the crest of the wave is well over my head as I stand on the beach. Due to the nature of the shore break, waves come in big here and just as quickly go right back out, but as they crash, they create the roar of a freight train. Each one I look at that towers over me has me thinking that this is the sneaker wave I should fear.

We spent just enough time at Garrapata to see all things big and small, but will have to get to driving as we still have 265 miles ahead of us.

With the sun setting before 5:00 p.m. at this time of year, it might not be all that late, but at this point, we were still two and a half hours from Willits, California.