Monterey Plaza Hotel And Spa

We packed up and went for a practice trip down to Pfeiffer State Park in Big Sur on Tuesday. The camp site was great; on the river with almost the whole park to ourselves. What a beautiful place to camp.
The tent went up without incident.
The food was great, thanks to Steve.....shrimp,asparagus and potatoes for dinner and breakfast burrito the next morning.

We have a ...

Finally left the noisy dorm room yay. Saw some massive waves along the coast towards Monterey. Stopped off in Santa Cruz, not much going on in Fall! Apparently it's wooden rollercoaster is a national monument! Got to Monterey and found a visitor centre for a map. Hotel man upgraded us to a deluxe king, had a microwave and a fridge! Watched lots of TV ...

From Santa Cruz we cruzed (lame) down PCH a bit more and were headed down to Big Sur. I hadn't even heard what Big Sur was (a mountain, park, restaurant, bar, beach?) but Christa and Ryan assured good things correctly. The ride was beautiful as before with blue blue water, cliffs, no real towns...just ocean on one side, earth on the other. Damn that winding road though.

None of us really knew what Big Sur had to offer but when we ...

After our nice drive up the coastline we checked into our huge motel room with all the mod cons - a luxury we were getting used to. Carl Jr for dinner a lovely American chain establishment which all things considered wasn't too bad, a box of corona and back to the room to watch a movie.

After a sound nights sleep we drove along the 17 mile drive, it was a beautifully sunny day so perfect for viewing the rugged coastline, a colony of seals and ...

... It was quite spicy and the flavour very complex. Azrael’s steak was really good too! The meat was done to perfection, and the sauce was also very flavourful and complex. The salad was very well combined, but the garlic potato cake was slightly disappointing.

You will notice that we hardly ever have dessert.... and this time was no exception. The desserts weren’t screaming our names, and we were pretty stuffed. All in all, another fantastic meal.....

... after Pebble Beach.

In order to enhance our stay, someone had organised an enormous vintage and top-of-the-range car rally that climaxed in a two day grand auction. There were more vintage Ferraris than you could shake a stick at including 250 GTO’s being offered at $5m. Bugatti Verons were two a penny, Lamborghinis were for plebs, anything under $100k was towed away and we could not dare to be seen in a smelly Ford Mustang (I let Debbie drive whilst I curled up on the ...

Final thought before departure: There is no "silver bullet" solution to the energy crisis. Biofuel will play a role in providing alternatives to fossil fuels as they diminish as will electric vehicles, hybrids, and perhaps hydrogen or fuel cell cars...We are living the experiment: Can we innovate?

... I can't wait to see her. It's been 4 years! She won't be home from work until 6 or so, so I will entertain myself somehow. I was thinking of heading to Carmel and maybe Big Sur if that's on the way. I know I will spend some time in Santa Cruz reminiscing too. I'll probably stop by my old community college and just drive around Santa Cruz. And, of course, I will be getting my shrimp burrito. And going to Trader Joe's...and ...

... getting for free as we have been waiting around all night...so we will see. I appologise for the lack of photos on flickr but there is no internet connection quick enough to uplode and it takes adges as i have many photos as you would expect. Over the last few previos day, we have been to Yosemite National Park, which is amazing. We stayed at Evergreen lodge in permant tents and it was luxary camping. We managed to see 2 brown bears while we were walking but ...

... houses opposite the beach. We ended up at a huge bay which was packed with surfers.

















Further south was the beautiful ...