Today was our road trip down to Santa Barbara via The Big Sur.
We started off with a walk on Carmel beach and some shopping in the beautiful town of Carmel by the Sea – we now know where the shops are after yesterday’s fiasco of us walking down every street except the ones containing shops and restaurants - we really believed it was a ghost town!! Carmel is delightful and so posh that even the town clock is made by Rolex!!
A quick coffee stop (no cake!) and I then fired the Charger up and we headed off down 17 mile drive. It’s the first time I had driven in America and loved it. Careful observers would notice that drying out in the back window was Peter and Sonya’s underwear that they had washed the night before! I have included a picture in case you want to see how it looked...
The views (not of the underwear) were stunning and we stopped off many times en route for some great photo opportunities. We all decided we wanted to live on 17 mile drive in the $10m plus houses that line it. Pebble Beach golf club was a particular highlight with amazing views over the ocean front.
We wound our way down The Big Sur on Pacific Highway 1 – a stunning drive with spectacular views that the photos will do a lot better job of describing. Dramatic seascapes, plunging cliff faces, crashing waves, and mountain views.
En route we thought we would soundtrack our journey with some great American Radio – oh how we wished it was so easy...we got plenty of Latino stations playing weird Mexican type music, Country and Western music, or God Squad preaching music – at one time the only station we could pick up was a Jazz station...nice , great, smoooooooooth, Jazz. Most of the journey was sound tracked by skipping radio stations.
We visited a stunning beach called Pfeiffer Beach and you would never guess who was sunbathing in her Bikini there...well it wasn’t Michelle unfortunately! We also stopped off for a drink at Nepenthe which had stunning views of the ocean.
We stopped for dinner at the Moonstone beach front restaurant which had stunning sunset views - we were all busy pre dinner taking artistic shots of the sunset. A couple of drinks and some good food later and we were on our way for the last dash to Santa Barbara.
We got to the hotel late and checked in and then headed out for some well earned drinks. The hotel is right in the heart of a lively part of town. We checked out some bars where in one I got details of a great beach to visit called Santa Clause beach from a barmaid – not sure if she was winding me up but we are going tomorrow...it was loud in there and only heard intermittent snippets of our chat but feigned my way through it well!
Our last bar was visited as we had to make a dash from a total nutter. Sonya had noticed he had been following us for a while and he just threw himself onto the floor behind us and lay motionless – due to him following us we thought it was a trap so headed to a bar to get help in case he had hurt himself when he suddenly sprung up and chased us shouting “why did you just walk past me” Peter tried to reason with him but he was having none of it so we ducked into a live music bar until the bouncers got rid of him and had another drink – I met a NBF at the bar, Jody, who was concerned about our welfare – he played drums in a band that played a gig there earlier and we bonded over our shared hobby of drums, music etc.
When we were about to leave the nutter returned so we snuck out the back and headed back to our hotel pronto!! Welcome to Santa Barbara.
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