Three Days in Prehistoric Mountains and on to the Coast

We set a new record for number of nights in one place. We spent three days outside of Lone Pine in the Alabama Hills. These so called hills are prehistoric mountains that have been eroded by heavy winds and sand storms over thousands of years. They are wicked cool. We spent our mornings here tooling our belts and our afternoons exploring the hills. The views were mind-blasting. It was a great place to be quite and think (and to easily get lost).

We left the hills on Saturday morning with plans to drive across Yosemite. We read about some great sounding hikes we wanted to do.  As we were driving towards the park, we stopped in Bishop at a visitors centre to get some information. To our great surprise the highway the cuts across the park was closed due to snow! We had to drive about 3 hours around the top of the park (and the mountain range) to get to the west side of the Sierra Nevadas. Even this road had more than 15ft of snow along the road in some places!

When we did reach the west side of the Sierra Nevadas we found a nice little campground near San Andreas, CA. After 4 days without a shower, we were some kind of greasy! Yuck. So we were happy to pay the 20 bucks to stay at a proper campground and get clean. The site was quite nice. We saw at least 4 bird species that were new to us. We need to buy a bird book for this part of the world b/c we are just about clueless. We did find an Acorn Woodpecker that had a nest full of hatchlings in a tree at our site. It was pretty special to watch both the mother and father come to the nest to feed the little ones.

From San Andreas we made the 4 hour or so drive through Monterey to Big Sur. The drive along the ocean was spectacular. The vegetation along the cliffs was so colourful and there was such a diversity of shapes and sizes, every cliff face looked landscaped and manicured. There are still some cacti here, but a lot more succulents.

On Sunday we spent the day in Monterey. We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium ($30/person, yikes!) and we saw some amazing things. My favourites were the seahorse exhibit and the jelly fish exhibit. Seahorses are very unique biologically speaking since the males carry, birth and raise the young. Female sea horses deliver eggs with an ovipositor to the males underbelly when he is releasing sperm. That is all the females have to do with the young. The Leafy Dragon seahorse exhibit actually had a male carrying a wack of embryos. This is only the third time that an aquarium has ever had seahorses reproduce.

Male seahorse carrying embryos

After the aquarium we made lunch in a park and drove the 3ish hours to San Fran. We met up with Winnie (a friend from Kingston) who showed us a great time. First we went to Grand View park which gave us a great view (go figure) of all of San Francisco. Next we drove through the Haight, a hippie saturated part of town. We went out for Mexican in the Hispanic neighbourhood called the Mission. We had delicious burritos.

On Monday we explored some of the neighbourhoods and sites that Winnie recommended. We went for a big walk in Golden Gate park, checked out a great music shop in the Haight, and had lunch on a beach with a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge. We took the bridge out of town and made our way up Hwy 1 to Samuel P. Taylor State Park. And we are camping amongst the giant redwoods! Awesome! It is like magic here. 

 Peas