We hit the road again, this time for a trip down the romantic Californian coast; we were celebrating two years since our wedding. We left the hazy Davis sunlight behind and stepped into the whispering fog of Monterey Bay. We queued up beside excitable children with their excitable parents for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, possibly the most well-known collection of marine life in the world (other than the actual Ocean, of course). We saw a great white shark, several hammerheads, a couple of giant octopuses, and some really ugly eels. We really enjoyed the playful antics of the sea otters; before we knew it, we’d been there almost four hours.

We dined at the Jack London pub in the pretty town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, the clean and chain-store-free town where Clint Eastwood was formerly mayor. We ate until we were full, and I had a local Carmel wheat beer (it’s important to go local). We fell asleep early, and woke up to bright sunshine, whihc turned into intermittent grey patches of fog as we drove along the 17-mile drive down to the golf course at Pebble Beach, passing the much-photographed ‘lone cypress’ tree that has perched at the Ocean’s edge for three-hundred years. We stopped by the Carmel Mission, on the centuries-old Camino Real (King’s Highway, along Route 101), a glowing reminder that quite a lot of California’s European settlement began way before the Gold Rush, and that more than just Spanish names remain. We came across a large group of cyclists, who had gathered en masse to take the spectacularly Californian road that we were about to embark upon: Highway 1, along Big Sur.

We were not disappointed; Big Sur rises high above the Pacific, and drops to crashing waves below. We drove through patches of fog that swept in like an army of ghosts (though I noticed that at times it looked more like a fake special effect than real fog), and through incredibly colourful sunshine, as the wild crags threatened to push us off the edge and out of America. We ate wraps and grapes on the beach at Pfeiffer, watching dogs play in tide pools and waves thunder against giant rocks, producing great cinematic displays of power. We saw Pelicans and Cormorants, large Gulls and sleeping Elephant Seals, lying among the ruins of driftwood and seaweed. We reached Cambria by late afternoon, and had a romantic meal at the Brambles, beneath a painting of Venice, the city where we got engaged.

We left the Ocean the next day, but not before visiting Hearst Castle, the unbelievably opulent former home of William Randolph Hearst. We were guided through immense, grand rooms filled with Hearst’s massive collection of European art, mostly dating from the medieval and renaissance periods, mostly from the Mediterranean. We weren’t allowed to touch the marble pillars by the Neptune pool, which features original sculptures dating back to Imperial Rome; there is even a statue from ancient Egypt, far from home, watching the Californian sunset. We drove inland to Paso Robles, stopping at a winery for a little local tasting, before making the long journey back home. We didn’t want to come back to the Valley; the lure of the Sea is too strong for us. We uploaded our photos, and reluctantly got back to our real and busy lives.