How is it we’d never explored Carpenteria before? It’s a nice little town by the ocean that’s every bit as beautiful as Santa Barbara. We started the morning at the Carpenteria State Beach next to the Santa Cruz campground. With a little breeze and some serious humidity, the temperature felt a lot colder than in Arizona. After a short walk along the shore, we started our long drive north that, instead of the 4-hour jaunt it should take, might turn into a 10-hour meander for us.

We are on Highway 101, and if we’re not careful, we’ll pass out on the road due to the deep breaths we take, trying to savor every hint of the eucalyptus that permeates the air and interior of the car. That is, until a skunk makes itself known and has us wondering if it’s hitching a ride. And no, it isn’t the smell of weed, though we smelled plenty of that last night at Motel 6.

Our next stop was at the Glen Annie / Storke Road offramp in Goleta, where instead of turning right, which would have brought us to our great aunt and uncle who used to live here just north of Santa Barbara, we turned left to go have breakfast at Cajun Kitchen, an old favorite of theirs. Keeping up the tradition of my aunt Ann, Caroline is having a side order of toast with coffee, though when we are done here; we’ll backtrack a few miles so she can indulge in a healthier breakfast at Backyard Bowls on Calle Real.

A note about yesterday: we played semi-truck bingo as we passed so many familiar shipping company brands hauling stuff back and forth across the desert. From Old Dominion and Covenant to Swift and Werner, we ticked them off the list. Sadly, Sweet Simon with the skunk logo wasn’t seen, but then again, it’s been years since one of those trucks was seen on an American highway.

And what about breakfast at Cajun Kitchen? You can’t go back; it’s not the same without our family members. Nostalgia is a bittersweet dish that prods us to realize we should move on and away from things that can never be the same again, especially those places that are so intertwined with others.

Out of shared experiences with others and on to adventures shared by the two of us. We’ve been up this road plenty of times to be quite familiar with the golden rolling hills of the Central California Coast, but only rarely have we been here in Spring, when things are vibrantly green with bursts of color splashed upon the landscape. Yellow flowers appear and then quickly disappear. Getting a photo of them is difficult, with few places to pull over on this road and most everyone moving along at nearly 80mph. The photo I wanted remained elusive, while the one I took failed to show the grandeur.

Let’s Knit in Grover Beach was our first yarn store visit of the day. Caroline is holding one of my next pairs of socks in her hand. In her right hand is her mask, which I asked her to take off so I can capture her smile. California is remaining vigilant about masks and hand sanitizer. Some locations still have mask mandates in place outdoors, although the CDC has backed off of that necessity. Yes, maybe we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, but things feel better here with people being aware compared to the Wild West circus we are going through in Arizona. But enough about COVID; we are here for yarn, coast, fish, and great weather.

From Grover Beach up to SLO, as it’s known up this way, or San Luis Obispo, we stopped at the old Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa only because of its location across the street from, guess what?

Yarns…At The Adobe. While I grabbed another skein of fingering weight yarn for yet more socks, Caroline went hunting for some locally dyed crimped yarn that would find its way into a shawl. With no other business in SLO and 137 miles remaining on our SLOW drive north on Highway 1, well, that and the fact that we only paid for 24 minutes of parking meter time, we left town in search of more yarn and our next encounter with the ocean.

Great day for a drive.

Our first stop to take in the ocean is at a place we’ve never been before, Estero Bluffs, just north of Cayucos.

I learned as I’m writing this up that there’s also an Estero Bluffs State Park, but that’s further north up by San Simeon, another 20 miles up the highway. How these two locations share the same name is a puzzle I’m not solving here. By the way, the crowds heading up the coast today I was anticipating due to the road south of Big Sur being reopened never really materialized.

When we reached Cambria, where we were staying the next weekend, we were hungry for lunch and, of course, more yarn. We got the important stuff out of the way first with a visit to Ball & Skein & More. While it should have taken us 2 hours to cover the stretch of road we’ve traveled so far, we are now 5 hours into this journey with no intention of speeding up.

Outdoor seating in springtime has its advantages, and here at Robin’s Restaurant, it comes in a beautiful garden setting with properly socially distanced tables. It seems the kitchen got behind, but how could we care about that when we are enjoying the nearly cold breeze coming in off the coast?

There’s a section of road here in Cambria we’ve never traveled that runs along the ocean, and across the street from the hotel we will be checking into on Friday. We’ll have more time along this stretch of the sea soon enough.

Flowers are blooming everywhere, and if wasn’t for the fact that I already have 28 photos included in this post, I could have included more of everything from rolling hills to the ocean. Considering I feel inclined to write something with each photo, I only create more pressure on myself when I get carried away with showing the nicer aspects of our travels.

If I’ve never stated it before, it is my goal with these travel posts to share the arc of the day and what others can experience if they are NOT in a hurry to get somewhere. You see, years and years ago, there was a magazine called Giant Robot, and one of their features was called something like “My Perfect Day.” In those articles, they asked artists, musicians, and other creative types to describe a perfect day for themselves in the city they were living in, such as Tokyo, Edinburgh, San Francisco, or Sao Paolo. It was always a treat to read how a graffiti artist in Brazil might wake up for breakfast at their favorite little cafe, go record shopping, walk through a shopping district, stop to meet up with friends for a beer, and close out their day with activities that made them happy such as painting or whatever. With that in mind, I try to show a perfect travel day where Caroline and I are fully experiencing every moment of the day.

I mean, what’s the alternative? Lay around in the sun, fart, and go for a swim like these elephant seals? Well, I suppose, in some ways, that’s exactly what we are doing today.

The colony of elephant seals out here at Piedras Blancas is huge, and this was just the northern side of their on-land home.

Posting images of this place is an exercise of my obsessive-compulsive nature because we’ve stayed here once, years ago, and loved it. It’s been closed for many years now, and we thought it was supposed to be destroyed by the State, but instead, nature is taking its long, slow hand to remove it from its perch on the sea.

I’m telling you, I could have posted dozens of photos of flowers today.

I could have also shared dozens of photos of twisty, winding roads clinging precariously to the edges of mountains that drop precipitously down to the ocean.

With hairpin turns and vistas that beg us to pull over and linger in such impressively beautiful sights.

And then get out of the car again and fight the winds that work so hard to trigger my vertigo as we get close to the edge for photos that will remind us forever of the places we’ve been.

You are looking at a couple of miles of road that snake along the foot of these mountains. While it might be difficult to see in this smaller version of the photo, the road is out there as a thin tan line cut into the slope. Should you be wondering why I’m not waxing about the aquamarine color of the ocean and the silvery sheen where the sun is reflecting off the Pacific, it’s because my treasury of descriptive language has limits, especially when reduced to oohs and aahs, as we stand, astonished that we are once again in such a gorgeous place.

Nope, there’s no yarn out there, but we are starting to see some shifting in the weather.

Where’d this come from? Have we seen it before? Did I photograph this on a previous road trip up Highway 1? Well, it’s new to us today and looks remarkable from our perspective.

The waterfall is missing in action here at the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. I can’t say we’ve ever seen a situation where it was absolutely dry.

While things look beautiful here at the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, California, like Arizona, is experiencing drought conditions. Oh, we’ve finally reached Big Sur.

As we expected, the Big Sur Bakery was closed when we arrived, and our hunt for eucalyptus soap also came up empty-handed, but we did get this sweet photo of an amazing flower.

One minute later, we drove into this wall of clouds, and for the rest of the late afternoon, we were in drizzle and gray. That earlier estimate of turning a 4-hour drive into a 10-hour drive was a little off by 3 hours, as it took us 13 hours to travel the 240 miles to our destination in Pacific Grove just south of Monterey. I’ll save you the math; we averaged 18 miles per hour today, or 29 km/h.

Dinner was at Wild Fish Restaurant on Lighthouse Avenue, just a short walk from our hotel. Oysters, mussels, red snapper, and sable were the menu items that found their way to our table and that piece of chocolate strawberry cake we shared.

We are staying at the Lovers Point Inn at Lovers Point because, of course, we are!