by Philip

Today is an extra rest day! We built it into the schedule knowing that we would have two arduous days getting round the closure at Big Sur, and the hotel we chose is in the most stunning location, right on the cliffs, with views from our room straight out to the ocean. There’s a low fence outside the french door from our room, from which we can see a large rock covered in pelicans.

Having had a sumptuous dinner in the hotel restaurant last night – a rare treat to eat out on this trip – we had a lazy start this morning. Liz caught up with a friend while I wandered around the hotel grounds, and I saw a large pod of dolphins out at sea. One indispensable piece of kit has been our binoculars which live in my handlebar bag and are frequently used. We bought pastries and tea/coffee in the hotel’s coffee shop and sat in comfortable chairs looking north along the Big Sur coast – possibly our best breakfast location yet. We had decided not to go out on the bikes today, so after a post-breakfast nap (well it is a rest day), catching up on some AirBnB-related admin, and watching the sea for a bit, we walked down the “nature trail” to the beach.

The trail began with uneven steps, then became a rough path, quite steep in places, with sharp hairpin turns downwards. We had started the walk carrying a takeaway cup of tea but realised that was impractical when trying to manage the path, so we parked it under a bush and collected it on the way back. We saw a few lizards and heard a lot of rustling in the undergrowth. Access to the beach itself proved tricky with large boulders to scale, so while Liz sat under a tree I went further down and sat in the sun watching the crashing waves. Our climb back up stretched our leg muscles, and we rewarded ourselves with chocolate looking up the coast to the north.

We had a very chilled afternoon, reading and writing with occasional ocean inspection for whales (0) and pelicans (100+) and were graced with a visit from a humming bird to the flowers outside our room. One piece of admin was to check our mileages as recorded on the blog as we seem to be adrift from our bikes’ computers and we found a missing 50 miles so have updated the blog which was rather frustrating but good to fix! We finished up yesterday’s strawberries to fend off hunger before heading to the restaurant for dinner. It has been a very gentle, relaxing, rest day, finished off with a wonderful meal and gorgeous sunset.