Sunday, December 03, 2006

November 27, 2006





































Out of camp by 8, and headed south. Breakfast in San Luis Ospispo, before a drive to Pismo Beach. After a walk on the pier, I went out onto Oceano beach, which is the only drive-on beach in California. Nice beach, and long, but the vehicles distract from any serenity. You can camp here too, with registration.
Decision time. Stay down this way and explore, or make the turn around now, to get back onto Monterey Bay. I headed north. I do hope to be back this way sooner or later. Decided to cache my way back up to salinas.
On a drive thru Atascadero, I had an interesting DNF cache take me to an old Chalk Quarry. It was a dnf as the cache was in a rock (chalk) pile, which looked way too inviting for snakes. After a few minutes of gingerly making my way around the pile, prodding with a stick and peeking around (no hands please!), I decided it was not important enough to keep trying for. Cache name is "Chalk it up", gctbbw.








Further down the road, a cache brought me to Mission San Miguel Arcangel and Caledona Abode. The mission is, of course, quite old. The Abode is from the late 1800's.
After a non-descript cache just off of 101, I was headed to another that proved more interesting. Binary Blues-Black Gold (gc27c3). Across the river from the service road lies San Ardo oil field. Quite an operation, and totally unexpected.
After an evening arrival in Salinas, I thought that I would finally cache in my 1 1/2 year old swag from Mendocino, and headed to Monterey Brewing Company. The company's owners are cachers, and they had left their card with a note "good for two free ales" in a cache I did on the Big River, the summer of '05. Been carrying that card with me ever since, waiting for this opportunity. After quite an adventure finding the proper way to get on one-way Main street in old town, I arrive to find the place closed. Alas, nother year and a half, I suppose...

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