Adventures On the Road

There’s something about driving along the coast and sucking in the sunshine.  The magic of California definitely spun its web around me as we drove along Highway 1 from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara.  We spent a leisurely Sunday morning browsing a Farmer’s Market in Berkeley and picked up a tasty collection of  goodies for a picnic lunch: pumpkin bolani and sundried tomato spread, apples, grapes, dried apricots and chewy ginger cookies.  And I had just the place to stop for our lunch.

Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park.  Part of the Big Sur area and home to this beautiful view of a sandy beach cove, turquoise water and an 80 ft waterfall that drops from granite cliffs into the ocean.

The best view for our picnic lunch.  We got comfortable on a bench and dug into our feast.  Off in the distance we saw spouts of water mist as we watched the migrating grey whales.  It was a pretty popular place to visit and there was a constant stream of traffic of people walking the path, seeing the waterfall and moving on.  But we felt like we had a secret – everyone was so focused on walking the trail and feeling disappointed that the waterfall wasn’t larger (come on people – it’s not exactly rain or snow melt season!) that they weren’t even paying attention to all of the whales that were in the water.  So we kept quiet, enjoyed our farmer’s market picnic lunch and enjoyed the magic of the moment.

Our lunch detour took a little longer than expected….but we still made sure to enjoy the sunset before heading onto Santa Barbara.