Oceanside is the name of the beach town we came to. It was not difficult to find a place to park and take a walk along the beach. There were delightful little birds running in and out of the surf, digging for food with their long beaks in the outrunning water. We eventually concluded that these were sandpipers.
We put our toes in the water, but that is as far as we went, because it was freezing. We have spent plenty of time in the warm Atlantic surf off the east coast of Florida. This was no comparison. The Pacific is frigid in contrast. The sand was very different too. Florida's sand is very fine and white. It has a lot of calcium, because it is mostly made from finely ground sea shells. California's sand was darker, and coarser, with very few shells lying about.
Another indigenous species we encountered is the surfer. There were a few of these, dressed in wetsuits because they would not have remained comfortable for long in that water without some protection from the cold. We saw some spectacular wipeouts. Then we went in search of a restaurant.
We decided that after dinner, the sun was going to set over the ocean. Since we are east coast types, this alone was unusual enough of an idea to bring us back to the beach to take a picture of it.
We didn't stay long after that. One of the main attractions to us of coming as far as San Diego was the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park. We planned to visit both of them over the next two days, so we went back to our motel in Escondido, and got plenty of rest.
This approach to keeping animals is expensive, but we appreciated the effort these people are making to keep animals in a natural habitat. We did a lot of walking there, and we also took a long monorail ride. This monorail is really the only way to appreciate the size of the large areas in which they keep herds of African antelope and buffalo.
I didn't take pictures of any of the animal exhibits, but we attended one demonstration of birds of prey, termed a "Hawk Talk". This was the closest I had ever been to birds like this, so I took several photographs of the birds, along with the trainer who performed the demonstration. He showed us three birds. The first was a red-tailed hawk.
I thought back right away to a few days earlier when we were sitting on the deck of my niece's house in the Hollywood Hills when a red-tailed hawk flew right over us. It seemed really close then, but it was still much farther away than this bird in the wild animal park. The trainer also showed us how large the wingspan is by getting the hawk to stretch his wings out while still perched on the glove.
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The second bird we were treated to was a great horned owl. The horns are actually tufts of feathers. They give this owl a very distinct appearance. I was most pleased to be able to take this picture.
The trainer was also able to get the owl to spread his wings, and it was remarkable how he could flap them so much more quietly than the hawk. Owls have special feathers designed to prevent the wings from making sounds that would alert their prey. While hawks rely on speed to surprise their prey, owls use stealth.
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The third bird was a peregrine falcon. This bird was not shown up close like the others, so my picture is not quite as good.
The most impressive part of the Wild Animal Park is the wide open areas where small herds can interact as they do in the wild, but it is not something I was able to reduce to film, or pixels, the way I was able to with the bird close-ups from the "Hawk Talk".
After spending most of the day there, we left the park and drove the short distance to San DIego. We found a nice, inexpensive motel right downtown, so we checked in, with plans to spend the evening investigating the city. We observed that the hotel was located in a part of San Diego called "Little Italy". The hotel desk confirmed that this meant that there was a wealth of excellent Italian restaurants nearby. So we took a little walk along the embarcadero until dinner time, and then returned to Little Italy for a marvelous pasta dinner. Steffi really loved the mural of a pod of whales which was painted on one side of the San Diego National Bank Building, so I took a picture of it.
It was too late in the season to see live whales, anyway, so this was the best we could find. After dinner we drove through the historic gaslamp district downtown.
We did thoroughly enjoy our day at the zoo, but I didn't feel the need to take pictures while I was there, since it would look largely like any other zoo through the eyes of my camera. We put in a lot of walking, and the San Diego Zoo is built around a deep valley, so there was plenty of vertical hiking, as well.
It was good that we got that exercise, because we were about to spend some time just driving. Our rental agreement for the Kia required that we keep it in the state, so we could not go any further south, which would take us into Mexico. We had already been east into the desert, so from here we planned to travel up the coast.
The interstate (I-5) goes right along the beach for many miles. We made good time and had plenty of good views out over the ocean as we headed north towards the Los Angeles area. We stopped in a few places, like San Clemente, to drive around and take in the Spanish architectures of the houses, and to make this drive seem more leisurely.
We avoided the tourist areas like Disneyland and inevitably returned to the traffic and bustle of Los Angeles. While the traffic did cause us some delays, we were able to get through that area and to pick up the Pacific Coast Highway (101) at Santa Monica, and proceed up the coast, which means driving west rather than north for a substantial distance.
We took a few more side trips, including a long drive up Topanga Canyon, which yielded a great view of the San Fernando Valley. Eventually we ran out of daylight and stopped in Carpinteria. We had been incredibly lucky so far, concerning the weather we had been enjoying. It was perfect. We hoped that tomorrow would see a continuation of the same.
Morro Bay was one of the most interesting places to stop. There is a huge rock right on the shoreline there, called Morro Rock. It is actually the remains of a long-extinct volcano. Ships' captains have used that rock for navigation, as it is easily visible a great distance, and quite unmistakable. Now the rock serves as a haven for birds. It is 576 feet high. There are regulations prohibiting climbing on the rock, because of the disruption it would cause to the bird colonies there. We were able to walk part of the way around this gigantic rock, but a complete tour is not even possible, because of the heavy surf on the ocean side.
North of Morro Rock there is a beautiful long beach, complete with surfers. It is a really pretty area. After our break at Morro Rock, we continued north through the town of San Simeon. We passed the mansion of William Randolph Hearst. It is called the Hearst Castle, but we did not stop there.
At a beach just past San Simeon, we noticed some funny looking black rocks, and there were a number of people who had stopped their cars at the side of the road as if there were something really interesting there. So we stopped too, and walked back to where the rocks were lying on the beach.
Then we understood why people were stopping. these weren't rocks at all. The beach was filled with hundreds of huge seals. These were elephant seals a warning sign announced. It was against the law to feed or disturb these wild creatures. They have adopted this beach, and come up to lie in the sand. It is really quite an amazing sight. They are gigantic, and they just lie there and use their flippers to flip sand up on themselves. I wish I had had a video camera to show you this.
I did bring my still camera, and took a number of shots here, including one of Steffi posing with one of the smaller specimens. We also walked down to the shore, steering clear of the seals there on the beach, and I was able to get pictures of a few of the seals cavorting in the water.
Once we returned to our car and left the seals behind, the coastal highway entered a wilderness area. Here, the coastal mountains of the Santa Lucia Range come right down to the ocean. The highway climbs to height of several hundred feet above the shore and proceeds northward with a rugged steep cliff to our left going down to where the waves crash on the rocks, and high cliffs on our right reaching up as far as we could see. This rugged wilderness portion of the central coast of California lies within the northern part of Los Padres National Forest.
Driving this portion of the highway is more difficult, because the road has to keep snaking to the right at every ravine. We stopped at a few places just to enjoy the view. When we got hungry for lunch, we also stopped at one of the many turnouts that give views in all directions. I took a picture back to the south, where we had come from.
I also took a picture looking straight down the cliff at the waves crashing on the rocks for below.
This wilderness area continues for more than 60 miles, from San Simeon to Big Sur. Whenever there was a creek or river flowing into the ocean, the road either turned sharply to the right, so that it could maintain grade, and then came back out to the coast after we had crossed, or else in a few occasions the road crossed large bridges built by the WPA back in the 1930s. I took a picture of one of these, too, as we neared Big Sur.
We were now returning to civilization. Just past Big Sur is the Monterrey Peninsula, and Pebble Beach. We continued around Monterrey Bay to Santa Cruz. There was a lot more traffic now. At this point we had a choice. We could continue up the coast to San Francisco, or cross the mountains to San Jose and travel along the bay. We had seen a lot of coastline already that day, so we crossed over to silicon valley by higheay 17, which is a very heavily traveled commuter road, and went up the El Camino Real. After a short stop to see Stanford University, near Palo Alto, we continued on to San Francisco.
San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the whole world. We arrived in time to claim the hotel room we had called ahead to reserve, to unpack, and to take a walk. It was dinner time, and since we are big fans of Chinese food, we went right to Chinatown, on Grant Avenue, and found a restaurant there.
After dinner it was dark, so we walked down to Fisherman's Wharf, and mingled with the crowds. This was a wednesday night, and we discovered that there is a regular weekly nocturnal inline skating event which brings hundreds of inline skaters through the streets of San Francisco. We managed to stay out of their path, and spent several hours window shopping. We were no longer hungry, of course, but we found lots of lovely things to eat there and determined that we would find a way to come back and enjoy them some time.
It was a long way back to our hotel, and there were really big hills in the way, so we made the return trip by cable car. It was too dark to take pictures, though. The ride was a blast, and it didn't take very long to get back to the hotel that way. Thus we ended our long drive up the coast. We realized that since we had left the desert, each day had been filled to overflowing interesting things, but that even so, it was not difficult for us to choose a favorite. We agreed that the best part of our San Diego to San Francisico coastal tour had been the visit to the beach with the elephant seals.