Bug Sur and the coast

July 19

 

It’s Saturday morning.  The significance of the word weekend has faded.  The sun is coming up over the little parking lot that is the “campground” we found to keep us in San Francisco.  Our little patio of astro turf carpet, ten dollar Chinese made collapsible chairs and fold up table is squished between our camper and the neighbor’s slide-out trailer section.  The laundry we washed yesterday evening is draped over the chairs and is still damp because the laundry mat (very clean and well kept BTW) closes the doors “promptly at eight o’clock” and clotheslines are forbidden.  It’ll take weeks for Ursula to overcome the shock of being told we can’t hang up our underwear outside.

 

The day before we had left Solvang content in the knowledge we had a reservation at a really nice beach campground only to realize we had booked one in Mendocino NOT Monterey.  That’s a difference of about four hundred miles.  We had to reconfigure our plans (an absolute catastrophe for come of the more schedule oriented members of our party) and ended up staying at McGrath State park which is near the shore, but in not on the beach.  It was crowded and dark and we set off before Devin woke up (not having really spread out camp the night before).

 

We drove up the coast hoping the sun would gain the upper hand in the incessant battle between itself and the mist so we could see the ocean.  Most of the time we only saw these glorious, sun-lit and shadow filled, neck-craning hillsides to our right ending abruptly and precipitously in the mist to our left but occasionally we would see the shore below.  On one flat portion of the stretch, where we could clearly see the ocean, we stopped at an elephant seal observation point.  The ocean was gray and had many charcoal-colored rocks sticking out here and there.   Most were about as big as compact cars and some of them happen to have been elephant seals playing.  Their movement is slow and almost escapes your notice because of the waves and froth in the ocean, but their call is unmistakable.  It’s a long low flatulent grunt that sounds like a Harley Davidson starting for the first couple of turns.  The seals lie on the beach and occasionally a couple of them will charge each other and meet up bouncing chests because some offensive transgression of big fat seal etiquette has occurred.  We enjoyed it immensely. 

 

We had lunch looking over and into one of the many the cliffs we pulled off to see, stopping also at Julia Pfeiffer State park.  We hiked up there to see a waterfall showering a little club of privileged gulls and the foundation of an old house that belonged to one of the early twentieth century’s elite.  What a place to have lived!  At another pull-off, we hiked down to the ocean and grabbed a couple of oblong, completely rounded pieces of granite to bring back as mementos.

 

By the end of rush hour, we entered a mist covered Golden Gate bridge and came out the other side into the sun. Just as we came to the end of the bridge, where it winds around the mid-section of a hill, we saw a mountain size cloak of mist come rushing over and down the top toward us – cool but kind of spooky.  Today we’re heading into San Francisco, either by bus or ferry.