so cal road trip day numero un

why does blogspot always load the photos in reverse? so annoying. anyway.

so hurrah! La mama and I left on our southern california adventure yesterday. we spent the night in san francisco, where I got to go to delfina's for dinner (and have gnocchi and chicken and panna cotta) and la mama got to stay at sister's house and try and dodge flu bugs. i think i won that particular contest. we got up the next morning and packed up the car and drove through magically nonexistant san francisco traffic to Big Sur on the coast which was GORGEOUS, all windy cliff roads and sunshine and crashy waves and rocks and lovely lovely lovely

....and then had lunch at cafe kevah, which is the slightly more downmarket (and i actually think nicer) version of nepenthe restaurant (we went upstairs to look at nepenthe after our lunch, and it was full of fat people eating steaks with ketchup with designed sunglasses on their heads).

after lunch we drove on down the coast towards Hearst Castle, stopping to say hello to some heffalump seals (we passed a beach with literally hundreds of them slothing about looking as if they had just had a really big fish breakfast and couldn't be bothered to move apart from occasionally flipping some sand onto their backs to cool down (fascinating fact: apparently when lady elephant seals are in labour, they do a lot of sand-flipping onto their backs, so it's thought to be a stress response of some sort. we also saw lots of juveniles (who are about four months old by now) which were very cute. they are molting, which they do once a year, so several of them were looking very ratty with big patches of their fur peeling off, and one of the docent chiquitas showed us a patch of elephant seal fur, and it was about as cuddly and soft as a pot scrubber.

after THAT we drove onto Hearst Castle which I was secretly expecting to be kind of lame, a 1950's hollywood version of a medieval castle, with 1950's hollywood versions of suits of armor and heraldic flags everywhere, but it was way cooler than that. eek more later b/c we are supposed to be getting packed up to leave soon.

hearst castle (the _indoor_ pool, smaller than the outdoor pool, all blue and gold pseudo roman mosaics). i wanted to SWIM SO BADLY

mystery birds along the shore at morro bay where we had a sushi picnic on the beach for dinner and then went back to the twin dolphin motel and spent la nuit.

on to san luis obispo mission and santa barbara today. ok must post this before internet connection craps out completely.

love to all!