Big Sur

A real live otter in the wild!

Like 99.95% of the world's population, I think otters are awesome (the other 0.05% have problems bigger than I can help them with). So one of my big aims when we drove the Big Sur was to see real, live, wild otters.

In service of this aim, we started our Big Sur trip with a drive to a small marine reserve called Point Lobos. It, like the rest of the Big Sur, is gorgeous. Dramatic cliffs and rocks rising out of an azure sea and all that. You will be able to see that in the photos. What you can't see in the photos is that Point Lobos smelled freaking amazing. I have no idea what it was. I tried to make my fervent sniffing as subtle as possible. A lovely place to linger. There were lots of sea birds including some truly ugly brown pelicans (Will objects to my calling them ugly. They look much prettier in his photos) and egrets that stood on the top of the kelp out at sea, so they looked like they were walking on water. As we were watching the sky turn all sorts of spectacular colours, we saw an otter! He was just chilling in the ocean, fluffing his fur, twisting and turning in the ocean, generally looking like he was having a good time.

Quick Tips: Hire Cars

Picking a hire car company was a challenge, trying to figure out a reputable company that wasn't crazy expensive and met a few key things such as:

-Sufficient milage

-Ability to go into Canada

-Sufficient insurance coverage (since we don't have a US credit card or existing US insurance)

Included all of those things into the decision I picked Alamo for our LA car hire although there were some complaints on the reviews they seemed fairly reputable and were cheaper than most.

Our first dusting of snow, that shut down Arizona.

Pick up was interesting, there was a huge turn over of cars arriving and leaving and people just kept rolling in.  Unfortunately for use there was a distinct lack of small SUV's (for the number that had booked them) and the guy in the yard was trying to convince people into different cars, premium's etc.  We said we would prefer an SUV got given a medium SUV however after after a quick check under the car we found out it wasn't 4wd so we requested another.  They said they couldn't guarantee it but we fairly quickly ended up with an AWD Dodge Journey which served us well.  If you are thinking of going to areas with a potential for snow then I would definitely recommend getting a 4wd, particularly since most car hire companies I looked at would not allow you to fit chains.