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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 4

I woke up at 5:30am, before my alarm went off (which is pretty typical). I let Katie sleep a bit more while I was getting ready. Closer to 6 I woke her up. Not surprisingly, she was very grouchy, and a little after 6 we were on the road again. This time going north, back to the McWay Waterfall. Unfortunately it was very foggy: it was so bad I couldn’t see more than 200 feet ahead or so.

The waterfall was visible though, and the fog in fact added some interest to it, with the foliage and cliffs to the back of the waterfall disappearing in the mist. Definitely a different look than what you’d normally see with bright blue ocean water and green foliage.

On to Pfeiffer Beach! From the 1 it was a narrow mostly one-lane road with turnouts. But, since we were so early we approached only one other car. We arrived at an empty parking lot. This was one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve seen during our trip: there was a lot of sand, with big rocks sticking out of the water and the large waves were crashing all around them. One of these rocks is the famous Keyhole Arch: a rock with a hole, through which the sun shines in the winter time at sunset. We were of course here at the wrong time for that, but I still obtained a lot of photos of the area, also using my tripod and a 10-stop filter for some long exposures.

Katie started to become more active and she jumped a couple of times in front of my camera. She also took her own photos. There was still a lot of fog and looking back towards the parking lot, the sun was visible. Because the fog was very non-uniform, light rays were coming down in different spots, lighting up the trees irregularly. 

We headed back to our car and we stopped south of the Big Creek Bridge to get some shots of it. A little later we had breakfast at the hotel. Our next stop was Limekiln State Park, only a couple of miles away, with tall redwoods.

A beautiful campground exists here where you can choose to be close to the ocean, or in the forest among the tall trees. First we walked to the beach where a creek enters the ocean. I put my backpack with camera gear on a big rock and put my tripod in the sand. I was switching lenses, when Katie yelled suddenly “Watch out, daddy!”. A lot of water hit my shoes and tripod, and fortunately the rock with my camera gear was high enough to stay dry. I chose to put my gear a little further from the waterline. 

“Let’s check out these redwoods”, I told Katie. It was a very pretty forest. Several creeks stream down from the mountains here and we crossed a wooden bridge. I pointed out several blue jays and Katie put her 70-300mm on her camera. She seemed mesmerized by the birds and totally forgot about me, wandering further away following the birds. I took some pictures of her taking pictures of the birds. A little later she came back to me, completely disappointed and sad. “Look, daddy, the pictures are all blurry”. I took her camera and set it to auto-ISO, making it a little easier for her. “But now they’re gone”, she said. I told her we would keep on hiking and probably run into more.

So we did. She tried again and this time she got some good images of the birds. We crossed another creek several times and after taking some more photos and smelling the evergreens,  we headed back to the car.

We stopped at the elephant seal beach near San Simeon. I thought she wouldn’t be that interested since last year she didn’t really want to stop here, but this time she did want to see them and take pictures of them.

Now we were approaching Morro Bay. In the far distance I could see Morro Rock, but the top half was covered in a marine layer, the whole town was covered. I tried to take some shots of it with my 100-400mm lens, taking several vertical images, which I would stitch together later, but it didn’t look very promising.

Because we entered Morro Bay only around 1pm, and check-in at the hotel was at 4, we headed for downtown to grab some lunch at the waterfront, and walked around for a bit. When we exited the restaurant we spotted a sea otter close to us in the bay. “Oh no! It’s my patronus and now I don’t have my camera with me!” Katie said. (Note: a patronus is a guardian spirit animal in Harry Potter). “Let’s just walk back to the car, get your camera, and when we get back here, chances are it will still be here.” I replied. When we arrived back at the scene, the sea otter was still there. Katie was very happy and snapped away. 

At 3pm we drove to the Inn at Morro Bay: hopefully we could check in early. I had made a reservation on Priceline the day before and had picked a partial bay view. We were lucky that a room was ready, and it turned out to be a full bay view. Our room was on the second floor and there was only a small parking lot between us and the bay. Morro Rock towered in the distance.

After we settled in, we went to the pool, which we had to ourselves. We challenged each other to swim from one side to the other, using for example only one arm and one leg. Just like last year at the pool in Solvang. 

Later that evening we had dinner at the hotel restaurant. It was about 7:30pm and the sun was getting closer to the horizon, and with the fog partially lifted, I thought it was going to be a beautiful sunset. But we were still waiting for the check. Finally it arrived, and at 7:45pm we were back at our room. I quickly gathered all my camera gear and went to the roof of our building to take photos of the sunset. It was a beautiful scene, with boats floating in front of me in the bay, in the distance Morro Bay State Park, Morro Rock, and the sun setting to the left of it. Another good ending of a good day.