August 22: Route 1 -> Monterey, Cali

Theme songs: "A long and winding road" by Beatles and "Perfect day" by Lou Reed

From "The Lord of the Rings":
Legolas in Gondor, seeing the gulls: "...then I stood still, forgetting war in Middle-Earth; for their wailing voices spoke to me of the sea! The sea! Alas! I have not yet beheld it, but deep in the hearts of all my kindred lies the sea-loving, which it is perilous to stir. Alas! for the gulls. No peace shall I have again under beech or under elm."

We got of to a slooow start today as we ended up watching horror movies and stand-up comedy before bed yesterday. But it was great; we spent an hour by the pool before we set out at about noon. We took highway 41 south-west to Morro Bay, where we enthusiastically were going to jump into the ocean before quickly realizing the water was freezing cold! My feet were ice. It was beautiful though, and there were surfers, and birds and water and sun. Lovely! We stopped a couple of other places to check out the water, but ended up taking pictures and wading instead.





From Morro Bay we took route 1 north on our way to San Francisco. We'd heard that route 1 was pretty, but it turned out to be much more than that. It was beautiful beoynd compare, I almost stopped breathing at times, I love the sea! But it's not good driving really winding roads with no fences down to the water and not breathe (or watch the road) so we stopped in several places and enjoyed the landscape and took our time. Love love loved it, and thought about elves and dwarves and great stories. I can really see how writers get inspired by nature.



We stopped in Big Sur just to fill gas really, but in an outdoors art gallery we found kittens! My day was perfect! And Vib saw the cutest puppy ever, I think it was a St. Bernhard puppy and it had one blue and one brown eye. I spent most of the time in Big Sur playing with the cats, and then we were off again.


We were perfect with our timing in reaching Carmel River and catching (yet another) gorgeous sunset. It got gradually colder though, so there was no question of swimming anymore :( Oh well, we've had pools enough for a lifetime ;)
It got quickly dark after that (as it always does after sunset - it actually takes like 20 minutes before pitch blackness sometimes - good the .oon was up ;)), and we opted for a sleepover in Monterey, approximately 2 hours from SanFran. It was an impossible town to get around in, but helped by the GPS we found our EconoLodge (4th time this trip)(with a pool!!) and went to dinner after. One beer was all it took to get tipsy, and we had an overly fun time shopping groceries and other stuff we may or may not need at a local store. A bunch of nice french guys thought we were very funny and tried to hit on us on a street corner from their car but they were honked away by other angry drivers pretty quickly. So we went back to the motel and will hopefully (haha) get an early start tomorrow ;) See you in SanFran! Good night or good morning.

UC