On 'Detours' to Morro Bay

From Santa Cruz we continued to Monterey, also a lovely coastal town where we made a brief stop. There's also the '17 Mile Drive', a particularly beautiful coastal stretch (partly the road goes right through world-famous golf courses 😂). Actually, we wanted to drive down the (famous) Highway 1, which runs directly along the coast, all the way to LA from here. Unfortunately, there are often landslides, washouts from the sea, etc. on this road, and that's why sections are often closed. Unfortunately, this is the case now too. A few days ago, we saw a very small, winding 'shortcut' with the catchy name 'Nacimiento Ferguson Road' on Google Maps. But is it navigable with a 30-foot long RV..? There was no consensus among ChatGPT, Gemini, and the woman from the campground 😂🙈 Well, we had no choice but to simply try it out. 

After a wonderful night at 'Yanks RV Park' in the middle of nowhere (but with a pool and hot tub 😎), we set off. It was adventurous almost from the start: After about 30 minutes, we had to stop for the first time because the fire department was controlling a forest/meadow area that was burning down. The boys had a thousand questions and were fascinated by the flamethrowers that the men were handling 😉

After that, the road really kicked in. It wound tightly and steeply uphill, very reminiscent of Switzerland - luckily there was hardly any traffic! Reto expertly navigated through every tight turn and honked (much to Lenny's delight 😉) beforehand, in case any car came towards us. When we reached the top, we saw the ocean again - what a sight, those colors, simply beautiful 😍 Now we just had to navigate about 200 hairpin turns back down, then we elegantly bypassed the closed section of Highway 1 😉

The 'detour' was definitely worth it. Now we had 1.5 hours of wonderful coastal road with fantastic views ahead to Morro Bay. We made yet another stop at the sea elephants: Here are some of the largest colonies in North America. It's impressive how they (really) lay in masses on the beach! A friendly ranger explained many exciting things to us - we had no idea how interesting these animals are. A male can easily grow to 6.5m long and weigh 3500kg - and dive up to 2300m deep!

After that, it was just a few miles to Morro Bay - a beautiful place that I (yes, really!) discovered at the fitness center on the treadmill and that's why it's part of our route 😂 What exactly this is about, you'll read in the next post... 😉