Big Sur, part II - Carmel

January 2, 2009:
Once again, we woke up to gentle sunshine filtering through the giant redwoods of the campground:




We got a fire started and revivied ourselves with a little coffee and breakfast. Here are Kim and Jared with their dog Tasha. It looks like night, but this picture was taken in front of the morning fire ... those redwoods really did block the sun!


The wind had started to pick up (thankfully, we were pretty sheltered in the campground) and each big gust of wind would send hundreds of leaves falling from the tree tops into the Big Sur River. I scrambled down the slope next to our campsite to the riverbank to watch.



(see? I really was there!)



Rain was predicted for the day, which made hiking seem undesirable, so we decided to head up the coast to Carmel for the day. Carmel is such a dog-friendly town - nearly every shop had a water bowl for doggies outside, and many places allowed (well-behaved) dogs inside. We ate lunch at a great place called Forge in the Forest, another very dog-friendly location. Well, it WOULD have been very dog-friendly had it not been raining. They have a separate outdoor section of the restaurant where dogs are welcome - they even have a doggie menu (1/4-lb beef patty, hot dog, kibble, bone, etc). Too cute! But the "Dog Pound" was closed for the day and we left Tasha in the car while we enjoyed an amazing lunch. Stuffed, we retrieved the little lady from the car and headed down to the beach.






(I *think* that's Pebble Beach Golf Course?)

Jared "releasing the hound":


Tasha was so excited to run and play! At first, she was fetching a tennis ball that Jared brought down from the car, but she soon was far more interested in a ball of dried and tangled kelp (it looked like a ball of yarn but it was hard - I had never seen anything like it!).











Carmel is a beautiful town. The residents are obviously wealthy, but properties are modestly sized and there seems to be a real effort to keep the McMansions out. The roads are narrow and sometimes even have huge trees smack in the middle of them. The weather is temperate but wet year-round, which makes for the most stunning English-style gardens. It's a great town to walk around! With all of the damp, though, I had to think that it must be hard to keep the mold and mildew at bay! Some of the structures were very "green" but in an inadvertant way ...



Heading back to the campground in the mid-afternoon, we made a requisite stop at the Bixby Bridge, one of the world's tallest single-span bridges, built in the post-depression New Deal era. There are other similar looking bridges along Highway 1 in Big Sur, but the curves of Bixby are what make it so beautiful and photogenic!





There's a beautiful cave near the foot of the bridge. If you take a short climb down the cliffs, you can get a great view of it.



(the sun was trying to break through those low clouds out in the distance!)

There are pulloffs every 1/4 mile or so along Route 1. Most of them were probably intended only for slow motorists, but some of them are at really beautiful vista points. We stopped at a few more on our way back to Fernwood.









Saturday morning, Jan 3, we headed out early for Tahoe. As we drove up Highway 1 again, the early morning light was so much more beautiful than I anticipated! On our drive back the previous night, we had stopped and taken pictures of Point Sur, a huge volcanic rock that sticks up out of nothing and hosts a Naval facility and lighthouse (first built in 1889). It was late in the afternoon and still rainy, and the pictures were just okay. When I started sorting through pictures from the morning of the 3rd, however, I was stunned by how different it looked! What a difference the sun makes! And look at those happy happy cows ... they probably don't even know they're grazing on billion dollar property.







Back up at Bixby Bridge, the light was just coming over the top of the hillside, casting a partial shadow on the bridge. We drove up a dirt road that rims Bixby Canyon to get this shot - I love the rock out there in the water and how it lines up *just right* with the span of the bridge!



A different angle:


Nick, on that dirt road:


I didn't take too many black and white shots this trip, but I thought the architectural curves of the bridge lent themselves to the B&W format.





Obviously, the day was much brighter and sunnier than the previous one - how different the coast looks when it's bathed in sunshine! Here is the same cave from the day before:





And a nearby vista of the coast:




We tried to stop in Carmel Valley at Chateau Julien, a winery that Nick has fond memories of from his month-long stint at the Naval Postgraduate School in nearby Monterey (back in 2003), but it was closed and we needed to be moving on. Just down the road, however, was a modest-looking cafe and produce stand, so we stopped to pick up some vittles for the rest of the drive. The place is called Earthbound Farms, and as I learned from the cookbook I picked up there, it grew from a simple roadside raspberry stand to one of the largest organic foods producers in the country (http://www.ebfarm.com/). A fortuitous find!

The rest of our drive up to Tahoe was uneventful and we made it into the town of Truckee (much more to come on Truckee) in the mid-afternoon. We stopped at our favorite artist's new studio (http://www.elizabethcarmel.com) and eventually made it into Incline Village that night! I'm working on many pictures from our 5 days in Tahoe and I'll post them just as soon as I can!