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.

San Francisco in a Day

We had a flying visit to San Fran as we realised that we had way too much to pack into our last week out west. A visit to Death Valley (post to arrive soon) came highly recommended so we decided to make time.

San Francisco is a nice city of steep hills with cool houses and the need for mad parking skills but we didn't really know what to do with our one day as tourists. A bit of research showed up Alcatraz, Fisherman's Wharf, Lombard St and the Golden Gate, so we formulated a plan.

Alcatraz was actually pretty cool. I was a little skeptical but the stories were interesting and I think I got some cool industrial detail photos that I wouldn't normally go looking for. Jackie obviously loves the whole morbid history of the place.

Yosemite National Park

View of El Capitan as you enter the Yosemite Valley

I think when we were planning this trip, I had Yosemite and Yellowstone kind of confused in my head (they both start with Y, okay?) so I didn't really know what to expect from them. Turns out they're different places!

We were rather hoping for snow, since seeing the national parks in winter was kind of the point, but California was having a warm spell, so no snow for us. There was a plus side to this, since there were extremely confusing and ambiguous online rules about having snow chains on your tyres to enter the park - and you can't put snow chains on a hire car. On the down side however, given we were there on a weekend, that everyone in San Fransisco had decamped for Yosemite. We saw some interesting tourist behaviour, like a guy who, having had a friend take about 300 photos of him in front of the same bit of rock, took his shirt off to get a further 300 photos in front of the same rock, only this time with no shirt on, and a mother who pushed her perhaps 8-year-old daughter ever closer to a clearly nervous fully grown male deer, stacked to the rafters with antlers, so she could get a good photo. Hmmm. It's moments like that you really wish you weren't a 'tourist' because it's a word that puts you into a group with some serious idiots.

Photo Tips: Roadside Photography - North America + Photos

Western Scrub Jay

We've found road tripping are a great way to see the world but if you are anything like me (and Jackie), every time you see something interesting you want a photo of it!  While it might sound surprising roadside photography can be a great way to get amazing photos so I thought I might fill you in on my experiences in North America.

In the US and to a slightly lesser extent in Canada people always give stopped cars a wide berth and will usually change lanes if there is a car stopped beside the road, even if you are well clear of the road.  While it's not a big issue it kinda makes you feel bad about pulling over for photos, particularly if the roads is busy.  

Redwoods National Park

 

If you were to set a movie in Redwoods National Park, you’d have to make it either a ‘woman walks into the wilderness with nothing but a pack and a pair of hiking boots and ends up discovering herself’ kind of movie or a ‘group of frivolous teens spontaneously plan a camping trip and end up getting picked off one by one by a serial killer’ kind of movie. It’s a place that definitely has both vibes going for it. On the one hand, it has soaring, gigantic trees and gently filtering sunlight and rugged trails which wind through before opening out into gentle, green clearings. On the other, it has twisted tree limbs hanging with Spanish moss, monstrous spiders webs and a dark, foreboding canopy overhead.

We stayed a little way down the road at a place called Patrick’s Point, which I would actually have liked to stay and explore longer. We were just over the road from the sea, though we couldn’t see it through the trees, and we got there after dark and left early the next morning. Oh well, something to do next time. Here’s some pictures from both of us...

Portland

We stopped in Portland because we needed a place in between our stops in Canada and the national parks down the coast of California. Plus, if you haven't heard of Portland then there's something wrong with your internet. Like, you don't have any. According to my internet, every cool thing that the hipster world embraces seems to come out of Portland. Beards? Food vans? Amigurumi? Portland, Portland, Portland. Okay, so I have no actual evidence for any of this, but since when did that stop anyone from saying anything on a blog?

Still, I'm a bit torn on Portland. The place obviously has some very cool things going on including a fantastic food scene, great live music, craft and vintage shops to die for, gorgeous residential architecture, however, I found the highly visible poverty and homelessness extremely challenging. I don't know if it's there because people in tough situations come to Portland because it has compassion on them, or whether it shows that under a veneer of social justice, actually nobody cares. I like to think the former.

That's all a bit drab and depressing, isn't it! Here's the touristy stuff we did in Portland...

Canada Fly-By

Golden Eagle in Montana

So the next part of our road trip takes a turn from wildlife and landscape to people.  We noticed that Yellowstone was about an 8 hour drive away from some very good friends of Jackie's so, being a little crazy, we decided to make a side trip to Redclif, near Medicine Hat in Canada.  While this was a L O N G day of driving, it was a fantastic chance to catch up with (or meet) old friends, and, as it turns out we saw some pretty cool things along the way.  Jackie had always been told driving the prairies of Canada was pretty boring but we saw another side of them in sunset on snow, with a Chinook arch on the horizon (it's a Canadian weather thing).  We also finally got a good shot of a golden eagle in Montana beside the road.

Yellowstone Landscapes

Yellowstone is well known for its amazing wildlife but there are some pretty amazing landscapes too.  There were a few photos of geothermal landscapes in the snow mobile post and some 'wildlife landscape' in the wildlife post but I thought I'd throw up a few more from in and around the park.