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California Road Trip 2019

In the summer of 2019 I took my daughter on another road trip from San Francisco to Carlsbad.

Day 3

This morning we tried out the breakfast camper in The Yard of the hotel. I had a latte and a ham and egg croissant and Katie a hot chocolate and a Belgian waffle. It was good. We headed back to our room to get our things and checked out. We summoned an Uber and headed for Hertz near San Francisco Airport. We were about an hour too early but fortunately a car was available. 

Our road trip had started! It would take about 2 hours to get to the start of the 17-mile drive in Monterey. Katie is into Harry Potter now and according to some online test she did, her "patronus" is an otter. I had mentioned to her that a long time ago, before Katie was born, Marie and I had driven the 17-mile drive and I had spotted my first sea otter there. So she was very excited to spot one too and being able to take her own photo of it with her new camera. 

We arrived at Spanish Bay. The beach and the waves looked pretty but no sea otters in sight. So we headed to the next view point. Katie thought she saw one far in the distance but at 300mm it was still hard to see. I tried with my 100-400mm plus a 1.4x converter and it turned out indeed to be one. Still, it was so far out that at this magnification it appeared small in the frame. A little disappointed we continued our drive. Suddenly I spotted a deer on my left. I made a U turn a little up ahead and opened Katie's window. I slowed down and she took her first excellent deer picture! She was very excited and I took a picture of her (and her big smile) holding her camera with the deer on the LCD screen and texted it to Marie. Marie texted back that it was beautifully taken, better than I could ever do. Must have been a lot of auto-corrections in that reply. 

We drove to the Lone Cypress. Katie felt a little sad for the tree as it is separated from all other trees. But then again, she said, the other trees are probably jealous because it became very famous. 

We ate lunch at the Gallery cafe. Here, I planned for where to stop in Big Sur. I googled it and picked a few spots: Bixby Creek bridge, Pfeiffer Beach, McWay Falls and Limekiln State Park. We would spend the night at Lucia Lodge (I've always wanted to stay in Big Sur with an ocean view). It was going to turn out a little different this day (except for the Lodge, that was reserved). 

While I was looking up the viewpoint locations on Google Maps, I noticed a very long red line for CA-1 South near Bixby Creek Bridge. I couldn't believe traffic was so bad, and why?

When we were approaching the bridge, I saw signs like "One Way Lane" and "Flag Person" and "Be Prepared to Stop". And there it was: a mile-long line of cars. It went over the bridge and disappeared in the distance around the corner. No way I could take pictures of the bridge. It turned out, if we had arrived about 30 minutes later, it would have been clear because the road work was just being cleared.  

So better luck at Pfeiffer Beach? First we missed the turn as cell phone reception was not available and I was not using any drive-by-directions. Katie was keeping an eye out for phone reception and near a gas station there was some. We pulled over and checked Google Maps. It was only a mile back or so. We went back, took the turn, and there were a gazillion cars in front of us. Noooo. We went ahead at 5 miles per hour and after a while we saw a lady turning cars around next to a sign that said "Parking Lot Full". Only residents were allowed in. I asked her when the beach would open the next day which was at sunrise.  Maybe McWay Falls then? Nope, everything was full. We must have chosen the busiest week of the year.  

I asked Katie to take some photos with my camera through the windshield. I’ve had this idea for a while where I’d photoshop a photo taken at a road into a photo that was taken from the inside of a 1960’s Volkswagen bus. Back in June when I was taking part in the Hermosa Beach Fine Arts Festival, I had the opportunity to take some photos from within a 1960’s VW bus, that was parked close to my booth. Katie took a bunch of photos and one of them was on Big Creek Bridge.

So now we were heading for Lucia Lodge. The new plan was to get up before sunrise, go back to McWay Falls, Pfeiffer Beach and Limekiln State Park before everybody else. 

Lucia Lodge turned out to be great. We stayed at cabin 8 with a full ocean view. I left one window open so we could hear the waves all night long. At around 9pm, it was so dark, I tried some long exposures (2 minutes), to see if I could capture the ocean. That worked, but because the fog was already thick, not all the cliffs were visible. 

I mentioned to Katie that we were getting up at 5:45am. "Noooo, I want to sleep in!", she said. "This is what photographers do, Katie." I replied.