California Coast - San Francisco to Los Angeles - July 7th & 8th

After Santa Cruz we headed further down the coast via the coast road rather than the highway again, towards Los Angeles. As we once again didn’t book anywhere to stay in advance, being a long weekend with nice weather (recurring theme here?!) everywhere we looked at was booked out, so we headed to the town of Fortuna and a very expensive RV park there (nowhere to stay on the side of the streets here without worrying about all the homeless people, not to mention the parking tickets, everywhere was No Parking!)

We headed to Six Flags Magic Mountain the next day from there, then stayed right near the park that night (as it closes quite late) and headed further towards LA from there.

On our way from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara and Fortuna we were really excited to see a whole little sandy beach covered in harbour seals, which were hilarious to watch! They’re so funny and uncoordinated the way they move around on the sand, and they’re all squashed together uncomfortably, then they’re so quick and smooth when in the water!

Harbour seals

Then we saw some lovely coastline, as we wound our way down the coast…

Then we excitedly came across a whole herd (?) of elephant seals, along with many other people – there’s a certain fenced off spot where you can watch them up pretty close, so we did that for quite a while – it was hilarious, they’re like big (Massive!) slugs in the sand, that keep kicking sand over themselves but can’t be bothered to do anything else! Except for a few which hopped their way up from the water, and a few others who were halfheartedly fighting. They are really strange (hilarious) looking, and so much bigger than regular seals, you sure wouldn’t want to come across one when out in the water!

Elephant seals...

Heehee - like a massive slug!

In Santa Barbara we headed to the Al Merrick surf shop, where original Al Merrick surfboards are sold, there are so many of them… And there’s also a whole lot of previously used surfboards on display on the roof, eg. Board used by Kelly Slater to win the surfing world title in 1990.

Around this are we noticed that all of the ‘little towns’ we saw on our map were actually cities of over 100 000 people… it’s pretty crowded even within a couple of hours drive of LA… So we decided to bypass LA as much as we could, and didn’t bother going through it. What we mainly saw were the highways…

Massive freeway near LA, although strangely empty - about 8 lanes in our direction!

Much more usual...

And we also headed to Malibu (RICH man’s land) for a surf – it was a great day for it, and according to the (very rich, as they lived across the road) locals that Lawrie surfed with, this spot is usually scarily crowded but for some reason only 3-4 were there this day, which was great!