After wandering Hearst Castle for a couple of hours I got back out on the road and headed north to San Francisco. A few miles north of San Simeon I passed Piedras Blancas Rookery where the Elephant Seals bask on the beach and picked up Ben, a hitch hiker from England. As I was planning to hitch-hike around the country I couldn’t drive by without picking him up. It would be bad karma.
Ben turned out to be a very cool guy in his forties who had studied the Classics at Oxford and spent the last few years working for oil companies in Indonesia. As we traveled north over the next six hours we shared our stories and kept one another entertained as I stopped periodically to take pictures of supremely cool Mexican motorbike sculptures, the view from Nepenthe Restaurant in the Big Sur (where we also had a superb late lunch) and take conference calls with the MAD team.
When we got to San Francisco I fortuitously dropped him off half a block from the boarding house/hotel he was planning to try and find. Life just works well that way sometimes.
Elephant seals on the beach at Piedras Blancas Rookery, San Simeon, CA
View from Nepenthe Restaurant, Big Sur, CA
Mexican motorbike sculpture, Highway 1, north of Carmel, CA
Mexican motorbike sculpture, Highway 1, north of Carmel, CA
Mexican motorbike sculpture, Highway 1, north of Carmel, CA
Mexican motorbike sculpture, Highway 1, north of Carmel, CA
Hitch-hiker Ben, San Francisco, CA
