Day 76 - Big Sur, Day 1

After spending the night at Ragged Point, we backtracked south a bit to see the elephant seals near San Simeon. At this time of year, it’s just adolescents, who apparently have to spend a fair amount of time on land so that their skeletons form correctly. Weird. The beach was full of seals, but according to Nell and Brian it was comparatively empty. I’m a little bugged that the colors in my seal photos didn’t come out well. The first picture is of my favorite seal—he just looked so fat and happy. And, as the second picture demonstrates, sometimes they actually move around a little.

Then we drove through most of Big Sur on our way to Andrew Molera State Park, where we camped. On the way we took lots of photos of random pretty vistas (third picture). We stopped at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park to see McWay Falls (fourth picture) and did short hike to a much smaller waterfall in the woods. The light was on the obnoxiously bright side at McWay Falls, so that picture didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped.

After setting up the tent and grabbing dinner, we attempted to get a nice roaring fire going, but the wood was too damp to burn well, so it was mostly just a smoky failure. I really like the picture of Brian by the fire, though. A few minutes after we gave up on the fire and crawled into the tent, it started to rain.