Little Chaz and Big Sur
Mar. 6th, 2010 06:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo my poor friends Mark and Helen, after enduring all the strain and drag of a transatlantic flight, they land at SFO and collect a hire car and get lost and drive two laps of the airport (when did we stop calling them aerodromes, people?) and finally make friends with their sat-nav and negotiate their way to Karen's house - and find it empty of Karen, bereft of Chaz.
For we are downtown Sunnyvale folk, eating fondue. Fondues: cheese and chocolate. And great slabs of meat cooked - hardly at all, in my case - on hot rocks. Self-indulgent beasts that we are.
But Mark phoned, a little plaintively, and we fled to greet our guests. It is - I have said - slightly odd to have them here, but very wonderful. Overnight I was back on my old familiar sofa to make way for them, and back too to my old familiar unsleepingness (tho' I still assert that this is little or nothing to do with the sofa, which is a fine sofa and shall not be maligned. I have apparently discovered a whole second stratum of jetlag: I type this at six-thirty tomorrow morning in a motel, but I've been awake since half past three.)
Being up betimes, I made breakfast: leftovers tortilla, and marmalade chelsea buns. Aaaand then we hit the road.
The long and winding road, mostly: Highway 1, down the coast to Santa Barbara. Cliff-hugging, vertigo-inducing, except for those bits where it ducks inland and runs between big trees for a bit. We stopped and took photos a time or two, which I cannot post until I get home so you may expect picspam later.
And then we stopped for longer, where the land had slid onto the road and the base of the cliff beneath had been tsunami-battered and it was all a little fally-downy, and they were only letting accumulations of traffic through every couple of hours; but we didn't have to wait that long, barely long enough to decide that maybe we really should turn round and drive all the way back to Carmel and cut inland, or no, maybe we shouldn't - and then the road opened for a bit, and we sucked in our collective breaths and slithered through.
And went on very determined not to stop again, but there were elephant seals on the beach below Hearst Castle. Oh boy, were there elephant seals. There shall, as I say, be pix. Elephant seals are easy.
Also, I may have photographed pelicans against the sun; but that was out of the car window and I'm not at all sure it's going to look at all good in big.
And so in the evening into Santa Barbara, and food and wine and oh God did I want a drink by then, and my first-ever night in a motel. Which, okay, but the wifi is crappy and so is the sleep. I will try to post this, but not with confidence...
For we are downtown Sunnyvale folk, eating fondue. Fondues: cheese and chocolate. And great slabs of meat cooked - hardly at all, in my case - on hot rocks. Self-indulgent beasts that we are.
But Mark phoned, a little plaintively, and we fled to greet our guests. It is - I have said - slightly odd to have them here, but very wonderful. Overnight I was back on my old familiar sofa to make way for them, and back too to my old familiar unsleepingness (tho' I still assert that this is little or nothing to do with the sofa, which is a fine sofa and shall not be maligned. I have apparently discovered a whole second stratum of jetlag: I type this at six-thirty tomorrow morning in a motel, but I've been awake since half past three.)
Being up betimes, I made breakfast: leftovers tortilla, and marmalade chelsea buns. Aaaand then we hit the road.
The long and winding road, mostly: Highway 1, down the coast to Santa Barbara. Cliff-hugging, vertigo-inducing, except for those bits where it ducks inland and runs between big trees for a bit. We stopped and took photos a time or two, which I cannot post until I get home so you may expect picspam later.
And then we stopped for longer, where the land had slid onto the road and the base of the cliff beneath had been tsunami-battered and it was all a little fally-downy, and they were only letting accumulations of traffic through every couple of hours; but we didn't have to wait that long, barely long enough to decide that maybe we really should turn round and drive all the way back to Carmel and cut inland, or no, maybe we shouldn't - and then the road opened for a bit, and we sucked in our collective breaths and slithered through.
And went on very determined not to stop again, but there were elephant seals on the beach below Hearst Castle. Oh boy, were there elephant seals. There shall, as I say, be pix. Elephant seals are easy.
Also, I may have photographed pelicans against the sun; but that was out of the car window and I'm not at all sure it's going to look at all good in big.
And so in the evening into Santa Barbara, and food and wine and oh God did I want a drink by then, and my first-ever night in a motel. Which, okay, but the wifi is crappy and so is the sleep. I will try to post this, but not with confidence...