Our Travel Blog

A little warmer today, getting up to around 24°C this afternoon.

Today we decided to head south down the Pacific Coast Highway. The name is a bit of a misnomer as the PCH got nowhere near the coast on this trip. The area to the south of us is very agricultural with a lot of vegetables being grown. I have never seen so much activity in fields as I have here, there isn’t much automation beyond basic tractors, but there is a lot of manual labour.

Our destination was Lompoc, a town that has a large number of murals on building walls. On the way there we drove past Vandenburg Air Force Base, which is part of Space Command. Vandenburg launches a number of military satellites, unfortunately none were due to launch today and there was nowhere to get a good view of the area.

We arrived in Lompoc and went walkabout looking for the murals. Below is a selection of some of the photos we took. Some of them feature Vandenburg.

Monarch Butterflies are Prevalent in the Area

Below are a series of garage doors featuring local flowers

The two murals below really transformed a plain brick wall into a building.

The mural below depicts the founding women of the town who were against alcohol, hence the man trying to push them back.

The two murals below were fantastic, they really had managed to project a great 3D effect, both in the bow area of the large boat as well as in the wooden area. Unfortunately my photography left a lot to be desired as part of the boat is missing.

A Novel Use for Drums

A Street in Lompoc

We came home via a different route which went through vineyard country. There were miles and miles of vines, probably the greatest concentration we have ever seen.

Trailer on Site

Cool again this morning with overcast skies. We made it up to 21°C this afternoon at the trailer.

Today had been declared a lazy day, I played around with some programming on the computer. This was something I had been avoiding for the last few weeks as I really wasn’t too sure how to do what I wanted to do. In reality it all went well, so more programming is on the horizon.

Meantime Lyn was busy trimming 128 pieces for a quilt.

After lunch we headed out for a walk around the area. Pismo Beach is one of the places that the monarch butterflies stop at on their migration. There is a group of eucalyptus trees about a mile from here where the congregate.

Eucalyptus Trees

Eucalyptus Trees

Unfortunately all of the butterflies have left now, if we were a couple of weeks earlier we would have seen 10’s of thousands of them.

We continued our walk along a boardwalk with the intent of finding a few geocaches. Unfortunately we only found one, most of the others had been reported as missing, at least we got some exercise.

We left the boardwalk and came back along the  beach at the waterline where we found lots of sand dollars.

A Stack of Sand Dollars Found on the Beach

Sand Dollar With Embedded Shell

We left the hard packed beach and continued walking on the soft sand of the dunes; that gave us quite a workout! We finished up walking about 2¾ miles, the temperature down on the beach was noticeably cooler than it was back at the trailer even though it was only a couple of hundred metres a way.

Another coolish, overcast morning with the temperature struggling to rise to 20°C along the coast. Today we planned on heading north along the scenic PCH (Pacific Coastal Highway) aka Highway 1. This road runs along the coast from California, through Oregon and Washington states to the Canadian border.

Once away from the beaches of Pismo the coastline became a little more rugged.

We stopped near the village of Cambria and took a walk along the cliff tops, there were a number of wild flowers there that we (Lyn) couldn’t identify. My flower identification gets as far as yellow = dandelion and red = rose!  So if anyone can identify any of the following please let us know.

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As we were driving north, a number of cars were pulling off to the side of the road, for no apparent reason. There was a small rise at the edge of the road with a large field beyond. We climbed the rise and saw a sight we were not prepared for in California, or even the American continent. In the field there were about 20 zebra!

Evidently there used to be a zoo in the area, and the zebra were part of it. Nowadays they live wild in the fields.

From zebra we went onto elephant seals. There is a large colony that call this coastal area home. We were lucky, as in a couple of weeks all the seals will have left and gone out to sea for a few months. The beach area was full of seal pups, with only a couple of adults

Three Pups and a Male

There was also an adult female on the beach, who was much larger than the pups, but much smaller than the male. Males can grow to 16ft in length and weigh up to 5000 lbs. The females reach about 12 ft and 1200 lbs.

One the way back we saw a couple of guys on surf boards using kites to propel them through the water.

Talking to people along the way, it seems we are lucky at the moment; normally Pismo is besieged with strong winds and blowing sand. So far we have been lucky with hardly any wind. Long may it continue.

A little cool this morning, around 15°C, climbing up to 24°C under sunny skies later in the day.

After we’d got sorted out after breakfast we set out for a walk into the town of Pismo Beach, about a mile away. The town isn’t quite a Wasaga Beach (or Clacton), but it does seem to be a city dweller tourist area with a slightly hippy influence.

 There is a pier in the town which was fairly popular with fishermen,

and also offered a good vantage point to watch the local surfers.

We managed to pick up one geo-cache on the way. The second one we were looking for was on the pier, but there were two many people around to log it. Maybe during the week it will be quieter.

The campground emptied out quite a bit today, presumably everybody is going back to work (whatever that is) tomorrow.

This afternoon we just hung around the trailer enjoying the warmth and the fresh air. Lyn was having problems with her Android tablet not connecting with Pinterest. After an hour or so of gnashing of teeth and muttering, the problem turned out to be the date. The tablet thought it was 2009, when I reset the date to 2015 all was good!

Woke up to a partly sunny day around 16°C. After breakfast it was time to head into town to get some groceries. We headed to Wal-Mart as they normally have a reasonable food selection. Just as we were about to enter the store we saw a hairdressers a couple of stores down; we both needed a haircut so made a quick diversion to get that done.

Back to Wal-Mart, but it’s food section was pathetic so we headed to another store in town to get the rest of what we needed. Back at the trailer we had lunch, and Lyn headed off to the laundry. While she was away I spent some time (too much in reality) tracking down a bad Ethernet cable.

We spent the rest of the day just relaxing at the trailer, the temperature on the coast is a lot cooler, 26°C than it was in the town when we went shopping, 33°C.

We Skyped with Paul and family, it was odd to see them in our house! For those who don’t know, they have moved in with us for a while. They are having some minor renovations done to their house; digging a new basement, relocating the house to the new basement, adding a second level and other trifling things!!

Tomorrow we’ll try walking into town to see what it has to offer.