San Francisco to Big Sur

We were looking pretty forward to getting on the road again after a couple of days in the city, and also because we’d heard that Highway 1, which runs down the Pacific coastline, was pretty amazing. It was cold when we left San Francisco and the skies were grey, although it didn’t look like it’d rain. We had a quick coffee and chatted to some dude who’d done a bunch of crewing on Baja races in the past and was really interested in our bikes. He was super nice and cool. We left the city and planned to get breakfast somewhere down the line. We ended up at Sam’s famous chowder house in Half Moon Bay, where we killed a bunch of time because it’s so popular you have to wait for ages to get a table. It was worth it though. The food was good. But we ate too much, and I kinda got hit by a food coma when we set off again. As we rode the sun came out and things warmed up a bit. I was getting really sleepy though (food coma!) and suggested we pull over for a coffee in Santa Cruz. I kinda wanted to go to Santa Cruz to have a look around just because I used to love skateboarding when I was a teenager and my first ‘real’ deck was a Santa Cruz ‘Rob Roskopp’, and so now the words Santa Cruz are synonymous with skating history for me. We didn’t see much apart from a market and a bit of the main street though. Certainly didn’t see any real evidence of any awesome skateboard history?

We set off again and headed towards Monterey. I have to say, at this point, Highway 1 ain’t that great. Not compared to the roads we’ve done so far on this trip. There’s  H E A P S  of bloody traffic, the scenery’s ok, but it’s not that great. Monterey conjures up images and sounds of Jimi Hendrix for me as, again as a teenager, I used to have the video ‘Jimi Plays Monterey’. I watched that sucker over and over and over! So again I was expecting something… that of course I wasn’t gonna get. I was actually surprised how sort of clean and banal Monterey was. We went to a bar and had a beer after walking round the town. The bar was terrible and had this rasta dude doing karaoke guitar to Bob Marley songs. Urgh. We left and headed for Big Sur hoping to find somewhere decent to camp…

I can’t actually remember the name of this campground but it was pretty much the first one we saw as we headed into Big Sur. We went into the parking area and realized you had to walk to the campground. Malcolm went and checked it out and came back saying it looked pretty good. I protested because I didn’t wanna carry all my shit (a few loads potentially) down a track for the next half hour. I got talked into it however, and, yeah, it was a good campsite. We stayed two nights here and enjoyed the wildlife. We saw – up close and personal – deer, skunks, a raccoon, a bobcat, and a couple of snakes (I missed the snakes, MT and JW saw them… so they say). The skunks were actually cool as fuck. They came out at dusk and tried getting into our food and our tents. They were kinda little shits, but I liked their ballsy attitude. One came right up behind Joe and sniffed him on the ass in the dark. Good times. We were careful not to upset them and get sprayed though.