The Big Adventure: The Californian Coast & San Jose

Sorry for the late posting everyone, we've had such an awesome time travelling up the Californian coast that we didn't get chance to update. Well we left Dave and Juliah in LA and headed for Santa Barbara up highway 101. We spent a couple of hours in Santa Barbara looking around the shops, and later headed up to a campsite near El Capitan State Beach right on the coast. We stayed a couple of days chilling out and went up the hill behind the site to fly our kites.

From there we headed up the coast to Morro Bay and camped at the state park. The site was lovely and quiet. The complete opposite of LA.

Morro Bay

From Morro Bay we continued up the coast on route 1. The further north we went, the more awesome the scenery became. We went to a lovely small town called Cambria and stopped to soak up the view at San Simeon.

Coast near San Simeon / Cambria

From there we carried on up the 1 to Hearst Castle and then we stopped to see the Elephant Seals.

Hearst Castle

Elephant Seals on the beach

And just as we thought the coastline couldn't get any better, we continued on up the windy steep route 1 towards Big Sur. Words and pictures could not do this drive justice. Wow!

Highway 1 south of Big Sur

We stayed in Big Sur State Park under the redwood trees. It was very windy and some large branches blew down and dented a pick-up. Luckily, we managed not to get hit. In the morning we went for a drink at Ventana to soak up the sunshine and gawp at the view.

The following day we drove up to Carmel and went on the 17 mile drive - a lovely section of the coast littered with golf courses, beaches and posh houses.

On the 17 mile drive

We camped in between Monterey and Santa Cruz that night where mating frogs made dropping off to sleep quite difficult... We spent the next day exploring Santa Cruz and headed up towards the Big Basin State Park. We intended to camp, but the temperature had dropped so we stayed in a nice motel in Ben Lomond! The next morning we headed up into the park and went for a walk through the redwoods. They were enormous! At one point, a fallen tree blocked our path and we had to clamber around it's 4ft wide trunk.

Tallest Redwood tree - Big Basic California

We continued to head north from here towards San Jose so David could geek it up in Silicon Valley. The Computer History museum was pretty cool. It had everything from early counting machines to computer games. David could have stayed all day and night!