Monday, June 8, 2015

Gettin' Our Kicks: Chapter 7 - Day One San Carlos, CA to San Simeon, CA

June 5, 2015
We headed out from Russ and Debbi’s around 9:00 with an escort out of town by Russ on his KTM. 



On the way to CA Hwy 1 we stopped at Alice’s Restaurant for some brunch.

You can get anything you want...














Alice's is a bike destination and the Burgers are named for bikes.
Yes, I did have a BMW Burger
















No telling what you"ll see at Alice's

 After brunch we dropped down to the Coast on Hwy 84 and stopped at the San Gregorio Store where we said our good-byes to Russ.

San Gregorio Store opened in 1889. Picture from the Internet


 We stopped at Pigeon Point Lighthouse for a couple of minutes. I used to spend a lot of time here abalone diving.

Pigeon Point Lighthouse was first operated on November 15, 1872.


 The R1200GSA was cranking a little hard and I suspected the battery was going to go to hell in a hand basket soon. I stopped at a Batteries Plus store in Scotts Valley, CA and had them load test it. Tested OK, so we went on. More to come on this later…





After Scotts Valley we took a small side trip through Castroville – the Artichoke Capitol of the World – to see the Giant Artichoke.


Impressive eh!




Next up we stopped at Monterey and Cannery Row just to look and then followed the road along the coast and back out to Hwy 1 past Carmel and on towards Big Sur.





 
Lover's Point, Monterey Bay.
I did a lot of SCUBA diving here

We stopped for a few minutes at the Bixby Creek Bridge to take a few pictures. Right after we parked three guys from Sweden riding rental Harleys stopped. They all were flying Swedish flags – pretty funny stuff.



The day was gorgeous, so naturally there were half a million tourists out and they all stopped at the bridge at the same time. I really like this bridge and have stopped to look at it many times. I have taken a ton of pictures of the bridge, but can never seem to get a really good shot.

Three guys from Switzerland during a photo frenzy

Bixby Creek Bridge
Judith watching the half million tourists


 We left the half million tourists behind and continued south. Next stop was Nepenthe, in Big Sur, for coffee. The view from the outside terrace is beautiful.

View from the terrace at Nepenthe
 After coffee we continued down south. A ways further south the road gets pretty twisty and is great fun. That is unless there are 10 to 15 motorhomes and 22 cars going so slow you can count the revolutions of the tires. OK… so it wasn’t that bad. We managed to wind our way down the road and pass where we could or enjoyed the view going slow.



Once the twisty part of Hwy 1 was over we made good time to San Simeon and the San Simeon Inn for our first night on the road.

No comments:

Post a Comment