Attention: These posts following our coastal Christmas-thru-New-Year’s trip are named a bit specifically, that’s because when these were originally shared, they only had one photo each due to bandwidth limitations back in the day. Since that time, I’ve updated them to include images that relate to the details of each day.

We are on our way up the California coast through New Year’s, stopping for overnights in Big Sur, Santa Cruz, San Francisco for two nights, Point Reyes for two nights, and then back to Santa Barbara for a night before returning to Phoenix.

This is our third and obviously final trip on this stretch of coast this year.

Once again, we must linger on details of the small things that exist for mere moments and are seldom seen. The bigger pictures are shared everywhere, but things such as this seem all too often to be overlooked.

On rare occasions, I’m seriously happy about the photos Caroline snaps of me, it must be something about the way I look at her that made them turn out good in my eyes.

Who doesn’t love the curlew?

North of San Simeon at Piedras Blancas, we spotted three male elephant seals on the beach away from the main group a few miles south. Thanks to this random guy we ran into named Brad for pointing out that just a little further up the road, there was an even bigger specimen. This was Caroline’s view of me and the elephant seal, while my view is just below.

Whoa, this massive elephant seal looks…well…kind of dead, but NO, it is not dead; he opened his eyes to check me out, scratched, and went back to sleep. I guess weighing more than 2000 pounds and being able to crush me like a gnat he wasn’t much interested in my presence to pay me any attention.

Sometime, someday, we’ll make it out here at a time when we can finally visit the lighthouse up on that rock.

We love the sunset; we love the coast; we love one another.