The Great 2020 California Road Trip (3/7) – Beaches

My interest in beaches is like my SAT verbal score… it’s nonzero, but not very much so. Maybe around the 10th percentile among people. However, you can’t really drive down the Pacific Coast Highway without immersing yourself in… the Pacific Coast. Therefore, we made a ton of beach and sea side stops along the way.

To make the trip “complete”, e.g. being able to claim that we traveled the whole way from San Francisco to San Diego, we headed north first. China Beach was the location of choice for its view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The morning was darn foggy and chilly.

After a sea-side lunch stop in Half Moon Bay, we headed to Shark Fin Cove. It was the best view and the most interesting beaches on the whole trip, with a (decommissioned?) railroad track, a steep descend to the beach, and the actual cove. Good job to Ting for losing a brand-new shoe when the first wave hit… but it did catch all of us by surprise.

On the second day, we drove south from Monterey and spent a lot of time in the Big Sur region. Lots of interesting vista points, some less than half a mile apart. What was a 4-hour drive on the map took us all day.

Before reaching Hearst Castle (not open), we made a stop at Elephant Seal Vista Point in San Simeon. I don’t know how the people naming this place could be so sure of a particular wild animal’s visibility, but they did not disappoint. We pulled over and saw elephant seals… lots and lots of them. It was like a free zoo, and we lingered for an extended time.

After a night in Santa Barbara, we continued south to Santa Monica. We had a pretty nice lunch and strolled briefly on the public beach. I sort of wanted to walk on the (also closed) Pier, but we resorted to just looking at it from afar.

After a night in downtown LA, we finally reached San Diego. We got burger from Hodads and picnicked by Ocean Beach. This was a highly unpleasant experience, though. A mentally troubled guy was exposing himself not far from us, and was eventually removed by the authorities. Worse than that was the thousands of beach goers who had no sense of mask wearing or social distancing. Both on the beach and in the adjacent downtown, lots of people were having a good time as if they hadn’t watched any news in six months. It was difficult waiting for our takeout while people like that squeezed past us on the sidewalk.

We hid ourselves between two palm trees to enjoy lunch

Later on the same day, we visited Coronado Island. People there, including visitors to the famous Hotel del Coronado, were behaving similarly to those seen on Ocean Beach. As such, we were too uncomfortable to check out the hotel lobby.

Our last stop on the Pacific Coast was Seal Rock in La Jolla. The view was fantastic and we even saw some wild life. The Children’s Pool was pretty crowded though, so we didn’t go down.