On the second day of our expedition, we set out early from Solvang for the long, beautiful drive along Big Sur and up to Santa Cruz. We had a fine breakfast at The Bear and Star, part of the Fess Parker Winery, before hitting the highway back to the coast at Morro Bay.
Morro Bay is best known as the jumping-off point for the Hearst Castle (described elsewhere in this blog), for the enormous rock in the middle of the harbor, and for the fogs that frequently hide it from view. We got lucky this time.
A little north of Morro Bay is the road up to the Hearst Castle, and then just beyone that there's a little state park that we never miss, because it's the only place I know where you can reliably see the huge, ungainly, ugly, amazing pinnipeds known colloquially as Sea Elephants. You never quite appreciate the name until you see them in person. And there they were, grunting and snorting and moaning, heaving their titanic carcasses across the beach for whatever purposes impelled them out of the water on a hot July day. After seeing these behemoths, the sea lions in Santa Cruz are like fairies!
The drive up Big Sur was fabulous, as always. I made an observation specific to this drive: We saw many Cruise America RVs southbound from the San Francisco end of the drive, frequently followed by frustrated Corvettes! There are few places for passing on this long drive, and there's a very good chance of ending up behind a slow driver. This is not your commute - you're here for the view, so enjoy it, even if in more detail than you had expected. I did NOT see as many RVs northbound, but maybe that was luck.
Big Sur is a long drive for normal people, with few breaks. One particularly welcome one is Nepenthe, a large and well-appointed restaurant/ inn/ lookout point about 2/3 of the way to Carmel on the north end. There's a good restaurant that needs reservations, and a cafe with clean rest rooms and hot chocolate that Melissa declared par excellence, and a gift shop, and of course awesome views.
After Nepenthe, the drive becomes closer in and less grand (but still beautiful) until you get to Carmel and then Monterey.
I love Monterey. Lorna likes Santa Cruz more, and I can't knock that piece of heaven on Earth, but just a block south of the city line in Pacific Grove is Il Vecchio, where we had a terrific dinner on our last expedition, and they topped it this time. But first there was a disruption of note:
As per our Standard Operating Procedure, the two of them went shopping through Cannery Row, leaving me unsupervised at the Sardine Factory, which fine establishment takes locavore spirits seriously. Strictly in the interests of science (of course) I had time to sample a local Santa Cruz Venus gin in a Martini that was well-made by Carlo.
That will teach them! I think...
Anyway, I wasn't really hungry when we walked over to Il Vecchio, but I knew that even an appetizer would introduce me to unexpected gastronomic delights.
I wasn't disappointed! I think the details of the dinner are on TripAdvisor (maybe not if the preceding glowing review was too recent), but just as an example of why you must experience the restaurant of someone who knows way more than what he got in voke school (or the Army), after our entrees while the ladies discussed desserts, I noticed that the dessert menu included Vin Santo, a magnificent Italian dolce dessert wine with a perfect post-prandial balance of sweetness and acidity and depth that is quite conducive to sinking back into your chair with a long, satisfied "aaaaahhhhh". So I ordered one for Melissa, thus setting up a most satisfying recurring theme for this trip.