Woke to another beautiful, California morning and had a chance to talk to David (we've camped 3 nights in a row with him) and found out he's a retired physician. He's feeling the pressure to complete his trip so we may not see him again. After a couple, gradual but moderate climbs (800' elevation gains), we had lunch at Ragged Point where we saw 11 Shelby Cobras who were on a rally to Carmel. We recommend this as a place to stop as they have reasonably priced food unlike a number of other small places we had stopped at. Further down the road just before Hearst Castle, we pulled off at Piedras Blancas, along with lots of other people in cars to watch hundreds of elephant seals basking in the sun on the sandy beach. They were quite active flipping the sand on themselves, going in and out of the water, and sparring with each other. Apparently these are all young seals but some of them are quite large as an adult male can be 16' long and weigh 5000 lbs. If you want to see a live web cam of the elephant seals on the beach, you can go to www.elephantseal.org. We stopped at Hearst Castle to see if we could go on a tour but they were booked today so we scheduled a tour for in the morning. We went on down the road 5 miles to San Simeon State Beach. The young couple, Tom & Brittany were also at this camp who we have seen on and off for probably the last month. They are also traveling from Canada to Mexico. It seems that the car of choice for the last 2 days in this area has been Mustang convertibles. The afternoon ride had a pleasant tail wind to help us along as well as the terrain was flatter so more enjoyable. We rode 36 1/2 miles today.
In our pre-children days, we traveled Hwy 1 down the coast and stayed at the Ragged Point Inn, arriving at night, and in the morning, looked out the room window to see waves crashing far below. We also went on to visit Hearst Castle... its fantastic.
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