Framedlight

I thought it might be amusing to show you the difference between our style of car camping and the goliaths we often parked next to. Here are a couple of pictures of our car first thing in the morning at the campsite at San Simeon. We left San Simeon and started our tour up Highway 1 and the fabled stretch of road and coastline, the Big Sur. However Mairi was so entranced with the elephant seals that we had to pay a return visit. We also saw the sea otters again, this time two in the same vicinity and also many of the extremely ugly turkey vultures which soared over our heads continually. The natives did not always seem friendly and suffered from runny noses. Tempers could be lost very quickly But hanging around in the water was quite relaxing The sequence below shows the fighting between the juvenile males. The sea otters were a lot prettier and spent their time catching crabs, breaking them open with their stone ...

It was getting late in the day so we went back to the pier at San Simeon, hoping for a sunset. We were not to be so lucky, low cloud  and mist came in as it was getting dark but the low light gave me the chance of some long exposure of the sea and pier. We spent the night at the San Simeon State Park campground which we had booked in advance, not wanting to be stressed out looking for a space. The pier photographs are here, both in colour and monochrome.

After lunch we went over to a 'Discovery Centre' by the car park in San Simeon and found that there were 2 places a little further north where you could see elephant seals. The first area was quiet and we stayed there for a while watching the animals. The adult males were still at sea so we were looking at the ladies and juveniles. The adolescent males were feisty and kept rising from their normal stupor and having brief skirmishes, after which they would settle back down to sleep. Sleeping was done in heaps, preferably one above the other. In the height of the winter season there are apparently around 16,000 of these giant seals breeding along this stretch of coast. Here is a picture of an overview of their rookery. Seals were not the only animals on offer. Here is an egret and below a rock full of cormorants and then a pelican. This seal had a penchant for seaweed. There were lot of runny noses. ...