Sunday At The Zoo

Here are a few images from today at the San Diego Zoo. I didn't get there until fairly late in the morning, when it was cool and overcast. By mid-afternoon it was turning into a really nice day.

The Red Panda was munching on some leaves.

The Lions were both right up to the fence, probably because right before I got there the keeper had been giving them some fresh meat at the Keeper Talk.

The mother Jaguar and her cubs were out. The baby Jaguars aren't so little anymore, they're almost as big as their mother. 

I found some Egrets near the lower Flamingo pool.

Chantek the Malayan Tapir was hanging out with her boyfriend Camo (he's the one in the back).

I wasn't expecting to find Christopher, the Malayan Tiger, still here. I thought that they were going to ship him off to Virginia earlier this month, but there he was, along with his brother Conner. The one in the back is Christopher.

Click here to see a few more images from the San Diego Zoo taken earlier today.
    

California Coast Road Trip - November 2012 - Big Sur, San Luis Obispo and South to San Diego

Here's the last installment of the posts from our late November 2012 California Coast road trip. 

It was a pretty nice evening in Monterey on Tuesday, but when we got up on Wednesday morning it looked a lot different. A storm had moved in over night, and this was the view from our hotel room on Wednesday morning. A few minutes after I shot this all of the color went out of the sky and everything went gray and rainy.

We were not going to let a little, well okay, a lot of rain and wind keep us from finally getting to drive down the Big Sur coast. I've lived in California my entire life, and I've only been along this stretch of highway once, when I was 16 and riding in the back of a big motorhome, not paying any attention to the scenery. Heather and I have tried to do this drive three times in the past, and each time something has come up when we got to Carmel, and we put it off.

It's about 90 miles from Carmel to San Simeon, along a stretch of CA-1 that is considered to be one of the most beautiful coastal roads in America - through an area known simply as Big Sur. The road is only one lane each direction, with steep drops to the rocks and surf below. Some of the bridges date back to the early 1930's. The best views are had driving north to south, and that also is good during a storm since the falling rock and debris generally hits the northbound lane first. CalTrans did have a bunch of road-scraper trucks out, and they did have some things to scrape up in places.

The wind was fairly strong, blowing the water sideways across the roadway much of the time, so we didn't get all that many pictures. We didn't have a hotel room booked in advance for Wednesday night, so we were under no pressure to get anywhere specific. We could just drive until we felt like calling it a day, and if the road got closed, we would figure something out. Our tentative plan was to get to Morro Bay, and in the end we wound up going all the way to San Luis Obispo, just under 140 miles for the day.

The Bixby Creek Bridge on CA-1 is said to be one of the most photographed features on the West Coast. It's 714 feet long, and was built in 1932 of steel-reinforced concrete.

There are several vista points along the road, and we pulled into each one of them. We could tell that the views from each were pretty spectacular. Sometimes we could see them, sometimes not so much. Keeping raindrops off the front of the lens in the heavy wind was a challenge.

If you look really close you can actually see the headlights of a southbound car in the center of this next shot.

The Piedras Blancas Lighthouse was not open for tours on the day we went by, but we did stop to get a look at it from a distance. Opened in 1875, it was originally 100 feet tall. At the end of 1948 an earthquake caused enough damage that the top 30 feet had to be removed.

Continuing our journey south, we found the Elephant Seals at Hearst San Simeon State Park. Even though it was raining we had to get out and watch them for a while.

We stopped to check out the old village of San Simeon - it didn't take very long. The yellow paint of the old school house stood out nicely against the fog.

We stopped for lunch in the little town of Cayucos, and found a place that makes really good browned butter cookies.

One of our original ideas had been to spend Wednesday night in Morro Bay. It was very quiet in town, and once you've seen the rock there isn't much else to do. We decided to keep going to San Luis Obispo for the night. 

The picture I took of the rock from inside Morro Bay looked even more bland and boring than this one, which I got with a long lens from north of town. At least this shot has some action in the form of rough surf.

On Thursday morning we walked around downtown San Luis Obispo for a bit, and checked out the Mission and the little creek that runs through the middle of town. The Mission was built in 1772.

We continued heading south, and made a brief stop in Pismo Beach to check out the Monarch Butterfly Grove at Pismo State Beach. Heather and I first stumbled into this place by accident during our January 2002 coastal road trip. There were actually a lot more butterflies that year, but even in this relatively light year it's still impressive. The grove is primarily eucalyptus trees, with a few cypress mixed in. On Thursday the butterflies were favoring the cypress.

I wonder how long it took them to count all those Monarch butterflies.

South of Pismo Beach US 101 turns inland for a while, getting back to the coast at Gaviota. We stopped to check out part of the old coast road, the no-longer-used bridge at Arroyo Hondo, built in 1918.

The old bridge runs right between the Amtrak bridge and the current coast highway.

Even though we had planned to stay out until Saturday afternoon, at this point we decided that it wasn't going to stop raining anytime soon, and that we would just drive back to San Diego on Thursday. It was early enough that we figured Los Angeles traffic would not be too bad (relatively speaking anyway), and we could stop for an early dinner south of L.A. to let the Orange County traffic calm down.

We wound our way through Los Angeles, and made one last stop for dinner at The Fish Company restaurant in Los Alamitos. The seared ahi tuna with roasted asparagus was pretty good.

As usual, we had a great time on our road trip. This one lasted 7 days, covered about 1,300 miles, and took us from San Diego to as far north as Point Reyes and back. We drove the Santa Fe instead of the Xterra, so we stuck to pavement, but we really did see a lot, met some nice people along the way, and had some great meals.

You can scroll down through the blog for the rest of the posts from the trip, including one devoted specifically to pictures of the Chancellor Hotel duck taken at various spots on the drive south. Because it has taken a while to get all of these road trip blog posts up, you'll come across a few tigers and other zoo animals, and even a trip to the desert mixed in between the posts.

Click here to see more images from the Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Pismo Beach and road south to San Diego, from our November 2012 California Coast Road Trip.
    

California Coast Road Trip - November 2012 - San Francisco to Monterey

Here's another installment from our late November 2012 California Coast road trip - this one covers the drive from San Francisco south to Monterey.

After four nights in San Francisco (scroll down for the previous posts), on Tuesday morning we loaded up the Santa Fe and headed south along the Coast Highway CA-1. Our destination for the evening was Monterey, about 125 miles away. We took most of the day to get there, and in our usual style, didn't all that early of a start anyway. Before we left San Francisco we made one more stop at the far western end of Golden Gate Park to check out the Dutch Windmill and the Bison Paddock (home to a small herd of bison from the San Francisco Zoo).

Our first stop on the road south was the Pigeon Point Lighthouse. This lighthouse, which at 115 feet tall is one of the tallest lighthouses in America, was opened in 1872. Up until about late December of 2001 you could climb the cast-iron interior spiral staircase to the landing at the top. This lighthouse is very similar to the ones that Heather and I climbed in Georgia and South Carolina earlier this year. We actually showed up here intending to check out the view from the top in early January of 2002 - only to find out we were about a week too late. A large portion of the brickwork cornice on the exterior of the tower had fallen off just a week or so before we got there, it was closed to visits, and has been ever since.

The first-order Fresnel lens is 16 feet tall, 6 feet in diameter, and weighs 2,000 pounds. Although this original Fresnel lens is no longer in use, the lighthouse is still an active U.S. Coastguard light station, using a more modern beacon they've stuck up on the top.

We stopped for lunch in Santa Cruz, and then continued south to Monterey, arriving at the hotel in the late afternoon. It was too late to go to the Aquarium, so we opted to check out the shoreline south of town. It had rained some during the day, but it was a beautiful evening. We got to Lovers Point State Marine Reserve a little after sunset. There was a great view out across Monterey Bay.

The moon was close to full as it rose up behind this seagull on the rocks.

Monterey Bay was calm in the early hours of Tuesday evening. It wasn't going to stay that way for long.

Later we wandered along Cannery Row looking for a light dinner. Heather spotted an Italian restaurant called Paradiso inside one of the hotels. The menu offered Sicilian style sardines and Sicilian squid salad, and of course I had to try them both. I'm generally leery of hotel restaurants, and I've found that not everyplace that says they have Sicilian style food really means it - but there weren't many places that looked better, so we gave it a try. The sardines had a tomato sauce with fennel and raisins - which sounded like something I would make. The squid was served with a very light dressing and bits of oranges. Both were quite good. My photo, on the other hand, is not so great, since I started to eat the sardines before I remembered to take a picture. It's a good thing I'm not a professional travel photographer - I would constantly have to be ordering extra dishes.

There really isn't all that much to do in Monterey. We walked around Cannery Row a bit after dinner - it was really quiet, being the middle of the week after Thanksgiving. It's mostly a bunch of tourist shops and not-so-great-looking restaurants. We could tell the weather was changing, so we headed back to the hotel for a relatively early evening. We knew Wednesday would be a long drive, even if it was only going to be at most 140 miles. We didn't have a hotel booked for Wednesday yet, we figured we would see how far we got. We were finally going to make the drive down the stretch of California coastline known as Big Sur.

Click here for more images from our drive from San Francisco to Monterey during our November 2012 California Coast Road Trip.