The whirlwind

Greetings!  Oh it's been too long, much too long.  Much has transpired, many miles have been plod, risks have been taken, rains have fallen, boars have howled in the still of the night... we're here, we're safe, we're recharging, eager to get moving along.  The constancy we count on is change.  Life is grand.  Some recollections of the last little while to follow:

We left lovely Morro Bay early early one morning and took our last look at their magnificent lava rock, quiet and stern in the harbor.  This isn't edited light...

And up the coast we went through the beautiful village of Cayucos, then Harmony and on to San Simeon.  San Simeon has Hearst roots, and is nestled on the coast below the famous and utterly opulent Hearst Castle.  We opted not to tour the castle at the $22/person tour rate and instead stopped into San Simeon, viewing it as our last supply stop before the famed Big Sur.  We popped into the final outpost, "Sebastian's Store", and fueled and watered up before continuing up the coast.  Just as a side note:  The best, absolute best, veggie sandwich I've ever had was made in this quaint little store.  I'm not exaggerating when I say the sandwich was as big as my head.  ANYWAYS, off we went into the unknown.  The coast was beautiful as always and fenced perfectly with 5 level barb wire fencing that seemed to have been strung up yesterday.  Signs every few hundred feet stated the obvious, "No Trespassing, Violators will be prosecuted.  --The Hearst Corporation"  Ain't they sweet? ;  )  One ponders liability and property ownership significantly more when being channeled onto the pavement of Highway 1 shored up by the deep pocketed "got here first's/hearst's fences" on either side, not knowing where you'll lay your head that night as the feet sing their sore songs and the sun falls on it's steady course towards the horizon line.  Well, we slept somewhere, and woke in the hazy predawn and walked the whole day through.  To our east the rich mountain heights climbed quietly higher, and to our north we saw that the coast would soon meet the mountains and our mellow plodding days on the flats would soon be replaced by moderate grades, sharp corners, and droves of curve sick car passengers exploring the coast the American way, in cars, trucks, trailers, and RVs of varying size!  Vroom!  I'm not trying to pat my own back when I chide the masses on the coast motoring along.  I am saying unequivocally that I'm increasingly cognizant of the fact that we live bubbly lives, exiting one bubble to get in a car bubble and zip through other places to other bubbles, claiming we've experienced something special having done so.  I think that the bubble life denies us a quality of experience that we as a whole aren't beyond sensing somewhere inside of us, but do struggle to grasp is available to us if we only slow down and interact in more natural and intuitive ways with our planet.  In a short time walking I feel increasingly a minority in our society and witness more often the stranglehold truly unreal obligations claim in our thought processes.  I am not above anyone having walked a little ways.  I do appreciate the perspective this slowing period is gleaning for me.  And how quickly it vanishes if I let it!  Yikes!

One exciting thing to write; above San Simeon along the coast we discovered that there are miles of coastline the enormous Elephant Seal calls home for the breeding season!  To our delight we caught many views of these slumbering oafish animals.  They must be tremendously efficient in the cold waters to be as big as they are.  On land however, they are loud, flatulent, lazy, and combative with one another.  Here's one picture of hundreds of them sun bathing.  Please excuse the finger, my automated lens covering mechanism has failed and I had to hold it down with my finger for awhile before I got my Macgyver on and got out the duct tape:

We were much closer to the seals on several occasions than this picture reveals and seeing those doughy eyed 7 foot seal pups made me want to take one home!  I could just imagine taking care of one and watching it grow to 22 feet, adorable!  Without admitting much I will mention that our camping night before our ascent into the more mountainous terrain was on shared space with a lonely elephant seal.  Oh the stories I could tell!  Said night was spent somewhere near the furthest peninsula in the picture below.  This picture was taken from Ragged Point.

   

Then we made the steady climb onward.  Below you can see Ragged Point on the left.

And so it went.  Out to a jutting point, breathtaking coastal view, in towards steep impenetrable mountains, and back out again.  After what seemed like 15 or 16 miles of this, we found the wonderful and penetrable canyon, Salmon Creek.  ( If there are salmon in this creek, they were about six inches long.  I don't have a rod with me so I could merely view them as they swam lazily in the crystalline pools below white waterfalls.  I think they were some sort of trout, no locals asked had any idea what kind though...)   Official camping at Salmon Creek was about 2 1/2 trail miles away from Highway 1.  A welcome treat and a helluva way to end our long day. Here's a view from the climb away from the highway:

If you can't tell by now, I'm quite proud of our increasing ability to knock off tough mileage.  We're getting into a groove I think where bigger numbers are more manageable.  At Salmon Creek the next morning we saw our first banana slug.  It looked as though a big piece of yellow ghostbuster's slime had fallen from the trees into the middle of our little footpath and began edging it's way back to the safety of the dense brush.  It was about 5 inches long.  What a beauty!

 

Salmon Creek was a restful time.  We drank from the streams, we ate our fun little meals and enjoyed being off the pavement for awhile.  I couldn't resist a skinny dip in a nice pool and found myself warming on rocks in the sunlight.  We attempted a departure from Salmon Creek via another trail that would let us venture off pavement northwards and were rebuffed by the ever present and wildly happy Poison Oak.  The trails, which must be vigilantly manicured, weren't.  So after an hour or two of ducking and side stepping, and step overs, and general anxiety over accumulating masses of itching toxins we turned back and spent another night at Salmon Creek.  I really enjoyed the feeling of relief that comes when one knows that the fresh cool water of the creek is neutralizing the mounds of toxins and saving me from another couple of weeks where I wonder if I can tear my skin off thinking that would feel better.

We  made our way through some gorgeous little village hamlets, Gorda, then Lucia, resupplying at inflated coastal hamlet rates, still able to appreciate the quaintness of these little oasis' along our paved trek towards Big Sur.

Ah, Big Sur!  This long awaited, immortal land.  Bethany was asked by a biker traveling south with her husband, "Have you been to Big Sur before?"  "No", was Bethany's reply for the both of us.  She just gasped and shook her head as if to say, "Oh, you're in for the treat of a lifetime!  Bless your fortunate souls!"  The local print constantly reiterates a famous statement I now paraphrase, "The greatest meeting of land and sea on the planet!"  Or the author Henry Miller who said something along the lines of, "This is land as God intended it", like hey, this is where God got it right!  Well, frankly, it's a beautiful place, and if I were to use all of the hype and descriptive for what is technically Big Sur, I can't say that I honestly can distinguish it as somehow being on some other level of beauty than that which we've experienced for many many miles now.   The Big Sur State Park was closed.  It rained hard on us.  We paid $35 for a camp site.  Bethany almost got ran over.  Maybe sometime down the road I'll find a new appreciation for this place.  This time around I was just glad to have it in the figurative rear view mirror.  What's exciting to me is that we've been in redwood country for awhile now.  We slept one night under a bridge in Monterey county, just as Bethany's Dad did as a scout many moons and hair shades ago.  We've mixed with locals in the farmer's markets after a long stretch of carbohydrates and foods laden with preservatives.  Bethany has brand new boots that might actually help her feet survive our ongoing walk.  We've slept on amazing ocean dunes.  We've seen the most graceful and beautiful deer I've ever seen.  We've made it this far!  Hooray.  Signing off for now, feeling tired.  Soon we'll speak of our having made our way up through Monterey and into Cupertino where we've been visiting with Bethany's familia.  :  )