On Sunday, I washed off The Amazing Spider-Van and Jennifer loaded her up with goodies.
On Monday, we hit the 101 heading south for San Simeon. Four hours later, we stopped for gas in Paso Robles; it was 104 degrees outside. Gotta drink and kept going, turning right past town, heading west on the 46.
Thirty minutes later, we reached highway 1 and the Pacific. Just past Cambria, the ocean opened up before us, seeming to stretch out forever. It was 65 degrees.
We found our campsite and walked along San Simeon Creek down to the beach where I’d never seen so many birds.
Too many to count, but we’ve wandered enough of the coast by now to know some of their names: sandpipers, terns, pelicans.
There were hundreds of these little white ones I’d never seen. They had forked tails and made kamikaze dives into the waves for food, just like the pelicans.
There were hundreds of pelicans too. Soaring above us in formation, clustered on top of rocks, rows of them effortlessly gliding over the waves — their tips just touching the swells. They banked above us, then landed in the creek, furiously flapping their long wings in the fresh water to wash the salt off.
As we walked by the creek, they all took off in swarms, filling the sky.
I got pooped on.
Tuesday was JFran's bday. I found 470 pictures of the two of us and made a photomosaic. This was a lot harder than the mosaic I made a few weeks ago because I wanted to print it.
The program arranged 470 selfies into 1,859 thumbnails. I did at least 100 different runs before I made one good enough to print.
Even at 11x17, each individual pic is about the size of the nail on my pinky.
On Tuesday, we drove north up Highway 1, past San Simeon to where the elephant seals hang out. We left our phones in the van, so imagine chunky 11-foot-long, 5,000-pound water sausages with massive honkers. There were twenty lounging on the beach, another dozen sparring in the waves.
They were a little stinky.
Heading back down 1, Hearst Castle perches high on a ridge in the Santa Lucia Range.
Hang on, I’m going to come back to the castle.
But first dolphins — we saw pod after pod of them that day, jumping just beyond the surf. JFran is a beach girl and while she couldn’t care less about elephant seals, she loves dolphins.
JFran says only one thing is better — whales.
We walked out on the pier that juts into San Simeon Bay — and lo, a humpback whale cruised by. She made a couple laps around the bay before heading out. We traced her path by the entourage of birds that swarmed overhead looking for scraps whenever she surfaced.
Walking back down the pier: Hearst Castle up top, Spider-Van down low:
Daddy Hearst bought 40 thousand acres in San Simeon. William Randolph inherited it, and at 56 he started building his ridiculous castle.
He never finished it.
Hearst was a compulsive builder and collector. He stuffed his ever-growing estate (eventually 165 rooms across 127 acres) with more than 20,000 pieces of art.
Dude was a freak for Greco-Roman statues like this one.
My parents took me here when I was a kid. What stuck with me were the two gorgeous swimming pools.
Years later we took our kids. What my youngest remembers are the statues.
See, Hearst’s statues are mostly nekkid, and when you’re approaching puberty apparently this is disturbing.
“Dad.”
“Huh?”
“Dad, come here.”
He pulled me aside, needing an explanation for why yet another naked statue lurked in every room, around every terrace, a jump scare at every turn. I had no good explanation. Clearly this was bugging him, so we started counting. We got to well over 100 naked statues by the time the tour was done.
We felt accomplished. Anxiety vanquished.
Five years later, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. We were there so my oldest could check out colleges. About an hour into wandering the Met, Chaos Monkey was cooked and honestly so was I.
JFran and R were still happily toodling around the Egyptian wing of the museum, so to occupy ourselves, we took selfies with the Met’s healthy inventory of nekkid statues.
Every new discovery was another triumph, and we sent each picture to the family chat until JFran surrendered and we left to get ice cream.
On Wednesday, we turned back north, stopping halfway home in Carmel. The beach was full, but everyone on it stopped and stared as more dolphins put on a show in Carmel Bay and maybe … maybe we saw a whale blow out there too?
There’s no going hungry in the Van, but it’d be hard to top the dinner we had in town that night. After a piece of chocolate cake as big as my fist (we shared) we found the one liquor store in town and bought a lottery ticket.
On Thursday, we snuck into Point Lobos first thing before the fog swallowed it.
Later, on our last leg home, we stopped in Oakland to check out my oldest kid’s new apartment. It’s three blocks from the place JFran and I lived before, during and after we got married 33 years ago. R is engaged now and artfully navigating a career shift. She doesn’t need me to show her around colleges anymore.
Maybe someday we’ll have a new generation to hang out with. We can get bored at museums together and count more things.
I might have mentioned the artist Chuck Close to you before. This is definitely Closesque! Nice.
This made me smile all the way through. The pelicans, the whale, the ridiculous Hearst statues, the family chat… it reads like one of those trips where nothing huge happens, and somehow everything matters. This is one of my favoritest drives. We did it in 2019 and 2022.
We are due for another.
Happy belated birthday, Jfran.