This was just a short visit - our first holiday this year!

We visited the Nike missile site on the Marin headlands - thanks to www.atomictourist.com for featuring that.

Then headed south to Half Moon Bay, home of the pumpkin patch (right). Got served a smoothie by a real live hippy and suffice to say thank God we weren't in a hurry!

Off to Monterey, where they are too posh to have street lighting. As a result we got thoroughly lost and ended up having dinner in Pacific Grove (after driving round for half an hour we just saw a Lebanese cafe and headed straight for it!).

We then managed to find ourselves in Carmel before working out how to get back!.......

Links

www.freetrip.com

www.cheapflights.co.uk

www.moon.com

www.bestwestern.com

www.motel6.com

www.metacrawler.com

www.animalaunts.co.uk

... We saw Carmel Mission the next day and
(like San Juan Bautista, which we also got to see) it's very beautiful and strikingly peaceful. See more at www.californiamissions.com .

Heading further down 101 through Big Sur (pictured), we got to enjoy some genuinely hot weather - shorts weather in December! The scenery's very similar to the west Highlands of Scotland (OK, apart from the rampant pampas grass) but not quite as beautiful. Makes up for it by being warm! The best bit of the holiday was seeing the elephant seals on the beach at San Simeon at sunset. See http://www.pelicannetwork.net/sansimeon.html .

After going round Hearst Castle (which Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen should go round as an Awful Warning) we somehow got it into our heads that heading inland towards Fresno was a good idea. Well, it was pretty at first, but then the lurgie that everyone else had been going down with in the past few weeks caught up with us. To cut a long story short, we spent most of the rest of our holiday staying at Susan and Beth's (pictured festively) and doing very little!