Day 357 – 360: Californian road trip

Ok, so we hadn’t quite finished our trip. We had another little holiday to delay the inevitable. We had no other choice but to fly into Los Angeles from Rarotonga but as it cost us no extra on our ticket to fly home from San Fransisco, we thought it would be rude not go and have a look.

We reckoned the best way to get up there was to drive. Hiring a car was relatively inexpensive and it was a very pleasant route. We landed in LAX about lunch time and it was about 2pm by the time we had picked up our car (which is a whole other story itself!). It was quite daunting coming from driving in New Zealand to find yourself on the 7-lane freeway in LA. There must have been as many people on that freeway as there are in the whole of NZ. But never mind, the driving was fairly straightforward (even if the signposting was terrible). We stopped in Malibu for an excellent pizza and then just drove the two hours up to Santa Barbara. A bit tired and jetlagged, we just had a quiet night eating cheese and bread and drinking wine (you couldn’t get bubbly in Cook, so we thought we deserved a decent celebratory bottle).

The next morning we had a wonder around Santa Barbara, which is a very pleasant town – very clean and swanky, with an aweful lot of sunglasses shops. Then we drove a couple of hours north and stopped at a place called Morro Bay for the night.

The next morning we were up bright and early(-ish) to drive the Big Sur. This is a very spectacular, rugged and remote bit of coast line. Very much like driving in New Zealand really and and the daytime weather as about as warm as their Summer (it did get clilly on a night though). There was lots of remote beaches to stop at and have a picnic (or to talk to odd but friendly canadians) as well as a colony of Elephant Seals – and god were they big… and smelly; we didn’t hang around too long.

At the north end of the Big Sur, we spent a couple of hours wandering around Monterray. Another, pleasant pacific town, with lots of charm and a vibrant pier, with lots of places selling clam chowder. It was a good place for us to check out because we are both big fans of Steinbeck’s novels so we went down to Cannery Row where one of his books is set. I dare say it is a little different from the 30s.

A bit ahead of schedule, we moved on and spent the evening in Santa Cruz, had dinner at the most authentic american diner we could find and then moved on to San Fransisco the next morning.