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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Day 3 Recap

So I haven't had phone or internet in 3 days; sorry for the lack of recaps.

Also, I wanted to upload pictures, but a) it's difficult to upload anything significant over this slow-ass hotel internet, and b) it's gonna take me a while to weed out a lot of crap pictures, and put together all the many panoramas I took.

Something like 1200 pictures total for the week, so it's no small task.

Anyway, Day 3 was my coast drive day.

I started in Redwood City, where my sister lives, at around 6:30 AM. I headed immediately west, to Half Moon Bay, on Route 1. It wasn't until about 45 minutes down Route 1 that things really started to get interesting. There was fog the entire day, but it did start to clear enough to see things around 9AM.

There's a reason they say it's the most scenic highway in the world. Some of the views were just amazing. As with other aspects of my trip, photos won't even begin to do it justice (though I did take hundreds of them to try). My limited mastery of the language won't do much to clear up the image either.

I'm not exaggerating when I say I stopped probably 50 times during the drive to enjoy another view and take some photos. Every couple hundred yards the road would twist a different way and the view was completely new and seemed even more spectacular than the last. I thought after a few hours it would get old, but it never did - I always wanted to pull over at the next turnout and just stare at the shoreline.

Aside from the general seashore views, I also briefly drove through the towns of Carmel-by-the-Sea and Monterrey. Carmel especially was a really neat-looking town - I wish I had had a little more time to stop and walk around, but it was early in the day and I had no idea how long the rest of the day would take. In retrospect I definitely had the time - oh well.

For lunch I stopped at Nepenthe. Really neat place, kinda jutted out above the ocean with a big panoramic deck. Pretty pricey though - a chicken sandwich set me back like 16 bucks.

Eventually I got down towards Morro Bay / San Luis Obispo, which was near where my campsite was. The campsite wasn't too hard to find, though it was in the middle of nowhere. When I got there it was basically empty - no one was there. I was camping by myself, so this was terrifying to me. As it got later a bunch of other people showed up, though. Camping was uneventful, and I was up early to start the next day.

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