Day 13: Morro Bay CA - Santa Rosa CA

I stayed here last night:

This is not actually true, but the manager's name was Norman.  First Scientologists and now this.  I'm lucky to be alive, I tell you!

What is Morro Bay famous for, then?  Well, my chums Craig and Vicki live hereabouts but:

• I forget until Jun Nogami reminded me, which I didn't see until I got here, and
• They spend a lot of time mucking about in boats, or at least a boat, so they might not have been in anyway.

If you want boats, Morro Bay has 'em:

Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle "Avalon", yesterday

And a rock:

Morro Rock, yesterday

which is a volcanic plug like the wossname that Edinburgh Castle sits on, but less likely to feature on the lid of a tin of shortbread.  And there's a power station, but no-one wants to see that.  Alistair MacLean though it was a nuclear one, but it isn't.  And a one-legged seagull, but everywhere at the seaside has one of them.  And Wikinaccurate says there are sea otters, and this is actually Trufax, although the one I saw was too far away to be able to tell the difference between a sea otter and a seaweed, at least on camera.

Off up the PCH.  This would be wik on a sunny summer day, except that in summer the number of clueless grockles on the road would be three orders of magnitude higher.  As it is, every time you stop to smoke a fag/take a picture of a bridge/look for sea otters you get overtaken by the same Kia Rio, occupied by people who have never seen the sea before.  Her name is Rio and she doesn't so much dance on the sand as lurch around the corners like a landlocked walrus.

Edit: There has obviously been one of those "100 Things To DO Before You Cark It" articles in the Sunday papers/social media/communication from the Pope reading "Drive in the PCH in a Mustang".  Since every third car heading south had a pony badge, the Ford dealers in and around San Francisco are probably richer that William Randolph Hearst, whose castle, incidentally, I did not visit.

I went to Carmel, just to see if it was as horrible as the pictures suggest.  It is.  Nowhere as twee exists this side of the Cotswolds, and if Clint Eastwood was still mayor he'd find the owner of the Citroen 2CV and ask them whether they felt lucky, punk.

Things get a bit flat, dull and agricultural after Monterey which, at least according to Professor Larrington, is a prime spot for sea otters.  Just north of the place is Moss Landing Harbor, which has a bridge.  And sea otters.  No, really:

A sea otter, having lunch

All together now: squeeeee!

You will probably have to do the "click-to-embiggen" thing to get the full ottery goodness.

North to San Francisco, which is awash with traffic if you are sticking to not-the-freeway.  But it is a place of tremendous cultural significance because this:

BRIDGE!!1!

It was freezing and blowing a gale, so I did not linger except to observe this fowl showing off:

About two seconds after pressing the tit it descended on a small furry animal somewhere down the cliff and as it didn't come up again while I was watching, I presume it was sitting out of sight biting the head off its mid-afternoon snack.

After you get over that ^^^^ bridge you go sort of inland a bit and as is frequently the norm in this part of the world, it gets sunny and warm.  And full of traffic.  Not on the bridge itself either, but for most of the fifty miles from there up to Santa Rosa.  This is wine country, so I am shortly going to sit down with a nice cup of tea.