Happy Earth Day...

While I'm not much for the increasingly popular idea of turning off all your lights on April 22nd to show solidarity with Mother Nature and to stop evil, evil man-made global warming, I DO have a love of the natural beauty found on this planet. So in honor of Earth Day, we took some pictures (although honestly, it was less "in honor of Earth Day," and more because this is what we saw on our drive from Monterey to Pismo Beach today :)):

Before we set out on our trip down Highway 1 today, we happened to hear on the news last night that part of the highway was closed due to a landslide -- apparently during the rainy season, part of Highway 1 washed away into the sea. (Fortunately, no one was on the road when it happened, because it's a looooong way down...) As we drove, we kept seeing signs: "HIGHWAY 1 CLOSED 50 MILES AHEAD"; "HIGHWAY 1 CLOSED 35 MILES AHEAD," etc. We assumed there would be some sort of a detour once we reached the closed section, but since we'd only planned out about 100 miles to drive today, we weren't worried about the extra driving.

Does everyone remember my story about Saddle Road in Hawaii? The car rental company in Hawaii was so paranoid about that road that they actually threatened to void the car rental agreement if they found out you drove on it. Well, the "detour" road around Highway 1 was about fifty times worse than Saddle Road. In fact, to call it a "road" would really be using the term quite loosely. It was more like a winding hike and bike trail that had been paved to accommodate cars... a one-lane path that hugged a sheer drop-off into a valley of redwoods and brush and (I can only assume) the rusted-out remains of unlucky cars. Ten miles of the twisting, turning, motion-sickness-inducing "road" took us at least an hour to traverse. Eventually, the road settled down into something less chaotic, and a yellow dividing line appeared to prove that we were finally on a TWO-lane road. (We were also, we discovered, on a military base, surrounded by tanks and barracks and wide-open fields of obstacle courses -- normally not open to civilians, but an exception has been made, considering it's the only road around Highway 1...)

By the way, you'll notice I took no pictures of this section of our journey -- this was mostly because I was fighting off a bout of car sickness, and was afraid to move my head in any direction for fear of upsetting my already unbalanced equilibrium. (Well, that, and there were very few places to stop a car and take pictures on the narrow hike and bike trail...) 

Needless to say, it took us several hours longer to reach tonight's stopping point of Pismo Beach than we expected it to take. But hey, we wanted some adventure on this vacation, right? (Happily, it did NOT include plunging off a cliff into a valley...)

And we were finally rewarded with the view from our hotel balcony: