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.
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| You can get anything you want... |
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| Alice's is a bike destination and the Burgers are named for bikes. Yes, I did have a BMW Burger |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Three guys from Switzerland during a photo frenzy |
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| Bixby Creek Bridge |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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