A bonus day in Monterey

Upon waking after our third night at the Veterans Memorial Park, we decided we’d like to drive down the Big Sur coastline before leaving. Andy found the park manager, who not only said we could stay an extra day, he gave us good tips on where to go. We packed up, got a mediocre coffee and headed south on the 1.

Our second stop led to a beautiful beach.

The kids had fun waiting for big waves

...to run away from.

Looking North.

We saw lots of cows on this drive. (And many other drives.)  Watching cows lazily grazing on green grass in rolling hills is so peaceful! I see it, and love it and never take pictures of it. On this drive, I swore I was going to stop resisting the urge to capture the peace grazing cows invoke.  But I still didn’t. If you could zoom in on the photo above, you could see one of the bovine peacebringers, but not as artfully as I would like.

We hiked to a waterfall (trickle) in Julia Pfeiffer state park.

And then visited Garapota state park just before sunset. And low tide.

Hiking out to the cliff

Clambering down the cliff

And we found riffs of shells! These were alive - I wish I'd taken a picture of the spent shells, piles of them!

Some of our finds. The two purple/orange cones you see - one walked away! Oops.

It took a while, but Andy finally tore us away from the piles of shells on the beach to tidepooling.

I’m so glad we stayed the extra day.  This day alone makes me want to visit Monterey again!