Day Fiftythree - Aug 4, 2004

Our day began in the high test RV park luxury of Pismo Sands RV Resort in Oceano. When we do the RV park thing we rely on Woodalls Campground Guide for guidance. Pismo Sands gets five stars, the most an aspiring RV park can hope for, for "facilities". Woodalls also rates on "recreation", but we handle that research ourselves. What five stars means is great showers, level sites, large laundry rooms, etc.. At Pismo Sands it also means a phone jack at your site. Four years ago this was very exciting, for modem purposes. This time it is a little less so, as our upload requirements appear to be much more serious. We were able to use it for email and a little banking, but eventually decided web page uploading is best saved for broadband wireless connectivity. Brian spent the morning catching up on a couple days worth of didactics and Theresa did some housekeeping and sketching. We rolled out of our site at noon, headed north, and swung back through San Louis Obispo for some coffee/hot chocolate.

California Highway One from southern to northern California is overall one of the greatest roads in the US, but the windy scenic part most folks have a mental picture of is a relatively short 105 mile stretch between Cambria and Monterey. We passed through Cambria mid afternoon and enjoyed beautiful weather and low traffic volume for the next few hours of great views. We stopped for chicken burritos at a great little pub in Big Sur we almost remembered from our last trip at about 5:00, before heading north through some very exciting wind gusts (given the western drop off) to the Monterey Peninsula. Theresa has become quite a bus driver on this trip and handled the entire day of curvy road and pushy weather with ease. Go girl. The road from Carmel to Santa Cruz is an unpleasant, but necessary, stretch of generic freeway. After momentarily loosing our direction in Santa Cruz, we continued north toward Half Moon Bay. We had a cheap state campground from last trip in mind, but traveled too late and found it to be full. Our punishment was a spendy, but full featured, RV Park where (with mysterious wireless internet connectivity in the air) we called it a somewhat late night.