honeymoon day two.

date: Friday, 09 August 2013

final destination: Santa Cruz, California

On this day we started the trip for real.  In the morning we drove around SLO and CalPoly for a little bit, and then we headed up Highway 1.  Our first stop was Morro Bay, a beach that my family has been to many many times.  The feature point of the beach is Morro Rock, one of nine volcanic peaks that go from Morro Bay back to San Luis Obispo.

Next to us on the beach were people participating in a surf camp.  Jon was a little jealous.

We didn't stay too long here since we had other places we wanted to see throughout the day.  Plus the Pacific Ocean is bonkers-cold all the time, so it's only fun for so long.  But Jon did bring out his GoPro to play in the waves for a little.

Before we left, this awesome old man came up next to us and started stretching to get ready to surf.  Jon pulled off a stealth photographer move with the camera at his side and caught a few photos of him before we headed back to our car.  (We did see him surf once, and he was really good.)

Our next stop was Cambria, but we're saving our story from there for a separate post.

For lunch we stopped at the Ragged Point Inn & Resort because at that point we were starving and it was the first stopping point we had seen in a while.  We had to wait FOREVER to get our food ($8 grilled cheese - everything on the highway is expensive), but it was so worth it because we had an amazing view while we ate.

(This tiny beach reminded me of Moonrise Kingdom.)

Jon took over driving after this point, and yipes.  Of course the road got really windy when he started to drive and he took the curves a lot faster than I would have preferred.  (To be fair, I did (slash, do) things while driving that he definitely would not have preferred either.)  I managed to sleep through most of his driving, but not before we saw an awesome procession of old-school VW vans drive past us.  We switched drivers again at a stop near Pfeiffer State Park and got a little bit of gas (just a little, because it was a whopping 5.79 a gallon).  Jon took a nap, but it was short because we made it to Bixby Bridge for a stop.

There's something about bridges that both terrifies and amazes me.  I always get really nervous if I'm driving on or underneath a bridge and there's a little traffic and I'm standing still.  (Movies, you know.  They can make you think anything will explode or crumble at any given moment.)  But I also think they're really beautiful and mystifying, which is probably because I don't really quite understand how some of them work or are built.

The surrounding area was also really beautiful.  There was one house atop this cliff up here and I can't even imagine what it would be like to live in it.  Those people must constantly live in awe.

From here, it was straight to our campsite.  But not before we stopped at a Walmart because we'd realized that we left our pillows in SLO, and because we needed to get our dinners for the next few nights.

Just before we reached camp, we got to watch the sun set.  It was an interesting sunset because we weren't watching it fall beneath the horizon, but actually a layer of clouds.

Of course, in real life it was more brilliant and less grainy.

Portraits of the day:

(the last two were taken by strangers.)

(i updated the first honeymoon post with our self-portrait from that day.)

(we took the same photo a million times throughout our trip, just in different places.)