Road Trip 1;Bailey's Tours do CALIFORNIA'S COAST .

West Coast USA .San Francisco to San Simeon ( 5th to 7th April 2012.)

We picked the car up from the centre and started off on our road trip with the aim of a giving ourselves a week to get to Phoenix, which was about 1200 miles. Coming out of San Francisco seemed to be buiser than we expected with 5 lanes of very busy traffic. We would never have managed without a sat nav .

Our first planned stop was Monterey which was not very well signposted. We stayed in the Comfort Inn for one night which was quarter of a mile of Montererey Fishermans Wharf. It had a very quaint marina, famous for having the first Mexican Custom House, you could see it was owned by the Mexicans at one time as it had a large Mexican influance.

Montererey Fishermans Wharf

As we walked closer to the marina we heard thesound of sea lions which at first sounded like quite large dogs howling. Nearby there was a fairly large colony resting on some decking. There must have been about 20-30 sea lions resting very close to each other. There was also a few sea otters showing off near the peers too.   It is a place we could have stayed another night at least but there was still so much to see and do.

Sea lions sun bathing on the decking

Our next destination was to drive the famous West Coast, heading for Los Angeles which we were told was a must do. The first part of the journey we did the 17 mile drive Pebble Beach and Del Monte Forest which was a circular route costing $10 for the toll. There was 21 stop off points all surrounding three golf courses one of which Jack Nicholas had played. The views at the points were stunning and in between there were houses that obviously belonged to millionaires. Many of the houses had a a grand spanish architectual influence.

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All photos above are on the 17 mile pebble beach  circular route

We then followed the west coast through the Big Sur which had an absolute wow factor the road ran along the beautiful coast with fantastic beaches and views.We did not think it could get any better than what we have seen so far on our travels within New Zealand and Australia but this was equally as fantastic if not better. The windy roads ran for a bout 75 miles along the coast. Once on the road beside the lookouts, there were not a lot of places to stop to do photo shoots and we found only three places in total that you could stop for bed and breakfast which were expensive for what they were .(Between $100-200 per night ).

The Big Sur coastal route

The Big Sur coastal route

Our hired car stopped off on one of the lookouts

On our journey we passed  the famous Hearst Castle, where we saw more colonies of sea lions that took up the whole beach. It was like looking at Bondi Beach but instead of people, just sea lions.

Sea lions on the beach

We finally found a place in San Simion at the end of the Big Sur as even though it had been a leisurely drive we had been on the road for about 7 hours. San Simion had about 6 hotels and one restaurant, plus a lovely surfing beach. However it is famous for the large earthquake that took place there in 2003 that measured 6.5 on the richter scale.  We only stayed one night at Sam Simion and loved our journey south so far. However having both been to Los Angeles before, we decided to explore the inland and that night roughly planned our trip east, saying goodbye to some fond memories of the west coast USA.