Big Sur Vacation - Day 3

So we slept in on the third day. Even when we got up, we were not moving too fast. Might have been the half bottle of wine?? We checked out of our Yurt and hit the road. We did not feel like doing any more hiking, so we just took a leisurely drive up through Big Sur. We enjoyed the scenery, but I don't think we ever got out of the car. When we got to Monterey, we decided to stop for lunch. At one point, Barbara lived in Pacific Grove, so we decided to drive through Pacific Grove to Lover's Point. We got out and wandered around the area. It was pretty and I took a bunch of pictures.

About this time we were getting hungry and we decided that we wanted to find some coffee shop. I saw a restaurant across the street that looked like a nice coffee shop to me. Barbara wasn't so sure, but neither of us felt like getting back in the car and searching for someplace to eat. We went in and sat down. When we opened our menus, we found that that the owner/chef had his own syndicated TV show. Uh-oh ... The food was very good, but the prices were syndicated TV show chef prices. It seems kind of strange, but we were disappointed that the food was much better than we expected. On the first night at the Yurt resort, we were delighted when the food was much better than we expected. Unfortunately, this time we just wanted a coffee shop meal with coffee shop prices. Oh well, we suffered through a very good meal.

Closing Thoughts

All in all, it was a very nice relaxing trip. We planned the trip for mid-week in September hoping to avoid crowds. And that proved to be true. Almost everywhere we went we saw other people, but not a lot. All of the restaurants that we went to were half full at most. We had the trails pretty much to ourselves, we would see a few other people, but not many. Traveling in mid-week in September is a significant factor, but I bet the forest fires earlier in the year had an affect as well.

While we enjoyed the beautiful scenery, it was not unlike the coastal area north of Santa Cruz. The one exception was Julia Pfeffier Burns State Park. The water was such a beautiful shade of emerald green and the views were so dramatic. There is no match for it in Santa Cruz County. We loved the Yurts and we generally had great food to eat.

One other surprise for us was how much of Big Sur is privately owned. I am not sure why, but both of us just assumed that all of Big Sur would be State or National land. Yet it seemed to us like more of the land was privately owned than publicly owned. It was not really a problem, we still found plenty of great places to explore. And there are plenty of places that we did not get a chance to visit, but it was a surprise to us.

As I mentioned earlier, most of the inland trails were closed. That was not a big deal for us. Most of those trails are fairly strenuous. They do lead to some dramatic vista view points, however we were not in the mood for even moderately strenuous hikes. So I doubt we would have taken any of the trails even if they were open.

The trip was a great contrast with our vacation to Las Vegas. At our Yurt, there was no internet, no cell phone coverage, very few people and very little noise. I did not take my laptop and I never opened up my cellphone (in fact, it ran out of power in my pocket, but I did not realize it). There was no radio or TV in the Yurt and no newspapers or magazines at the resort. I did use my digital camera, but that is the only electronics I used. It is hard to think of a place much more different than Las Vegas. Hmm, earlier in the year, there was plenty of smoke at both places, but that is the only similarity that I can think of. :-)

In summary, we had a great time and we would like to return sometime in the future.