Road trip - part 2 (Hearst Castle to Monterey)

We got to Hearst Castle around 2 in the afternoon and booked a tour for 2:40pm. It's a 15 minute ride in a bus to the top of the hill and along the way you can see zebras and other exotic animals if you're lucky (we weren't). As there are lots of steps to climb and strollers are not allowed, I picked up a "baby backpack" to carry Lucas on the tour. That makes for a good workout! It was pretty hot up there (we find it very strange that the higher up you go in altitude in California, the hotter it gets - this is the opposite of most places we've been). Hearst castle is quite impressive but somehow feels out of place compared to all the castles and palaces in Europe. I also tend not to like the super strict "conveyor belt" tours where you're not allowed to stray from the path (there's actually a second "guide" following us from behind who's more of a warden to make sure you don't "get lost"). I must say if not for that I might have tried to sneak a dip in the beautiful pool!

After the tour we watched a 40 minute IMAX movie at the visitor center which detailed the inspiration behind Hearst castle and how it was constructed. This was Lucas’ first time in a movie theatre and he was very well behaved and even seemed to be watching the movie. It seems William Randolph Hearst was so enamoured of Europe from a trip he made there as a young boy that he tried to replicate the architecture he saw there 50 years later – I wonder what will come of Lucas’ experiences in California! Will he build a replica of Disneyland or Universal Studios in the hills of KL?

We then took a short drive to our stop for the night, the Fog Catcher Inn in Cambria. The Inn is right by the beach, and there are sea otters (or seals?) basking on the rocks right in front of the board walk by the sea. We had a very nice dinner at the Sea Chest, a seafood only restaurant just a couple minutes walk from the hotel. This was a very relaxing place and it would have been nice to be able to stay an extra day.

The most scenic part of the coastal highway is the stretch between Cambria and Big Sur. The road winds and curves climbing high into the cliffs, and there are spectacular views of the ocean along each turn. There is also a place where elephant seals gather, and July is the best time of the year to see them. It's a good thing that we gave ourselves a lot of time for the drive - even though the distance covered was less than 100 miles it took us about 5 hours as we stopped frequently to enjoy the scenery. We took a late lunch break at a place that claimed to have "the Top 5 rated Fish and Chips in the USA" - well the fish and chips was so-so, but the location was amazing. Just off the highway high up on a cliff, with views to die for.

We finally got to our stop for the night (a free stay on points at Holiday Inn Express in Monterey) around 6pm after getting lost in Monterey's one-way system for half an hour. We missed a left turn to the road that we needed to go to and had to drive all the way out of Monterey because left turns were not allowed on any of the 10 following intersections! The annoying thing was that we had been within 100 meters of the hotel when we first drove into town but we did not know how to get to the next parallel street. That kind of tired us out so after a quick walk around Cannery Row - all those sardines in tomato sauce I used to like when I was in school were probably processed in Monterey - we skipped dinner and had an early night.