Day 22: Drive on Highway 1 to Morro Bay

Today I have such beautiful animal pictures but the internet is soooo slooooow. But today I am honestly glad to even have a hotel room, but more about that at the end of the post. I will check if the internet is faster tomorrow morning, otherwise I will upload them in our next stop in Santa Barbara.

The day started with a hotel breakfast with chemical eggs and waffles as well as 0% Greek yogurt, hehe, don't tell the chickens and the Greeks! Something I won't miss at home. The weather was still cloudy and drizzly when we left. Inspector Uli noticed that there was light soot on our car. There are strong forest fires in the area, which is why most state parks in Highway Number 1 are closed. More on that later. We first drove to Carmel by the Sea, but at 9:30 am not much was going on. We walked a bit through the town, greeted the beach, and bought provisions at the overpriced supermarket, but we were in fancy Carmel after all. The town is really cute, but it wasn't worth taking photos at that time.

After the quick stop, we started driving on Highway Number 1, specifically in the only open state park at the moment - Point Lobos. It was very nice there and a group of rangers had set up binoculars to explain the animals to people. So in this park we saw sea otters, sea lions, pelicans, oystercatchers, cormorants, and more. The rangers were super friendly, showed us the animals first in pictures and then we looked at them through the binoculars. I went back to the car to get the telephoto lens to be able to photograph some of the animals. Since the lens was just the affordable one, the pictures are only mediocre, but it's better than not having any animals so close! By the way, if someone wants to make me happy, please get me a nice Canon L telephoto lens for a mere 2000 euros - thank you very much! Of course, this is just a joke, I would never spend (or let someone spend) so much money on it.

After a while, we drove out of the park and saw that we were lucky because no more cars were allowed in.

Now we continued driving on Highway Number 1. The weather wasn't great and most of the time we could see smoke clouds from the forest fire. There were signs at many corners thanking the firefighters. If this beautiful place escapes the fire, I have to come back here again and enjoy it more. Nevertheless, we made some photo stops and bypassed the closed state parks like "Big Sur" and "Julia Pfeifer" - such a shame! But one point was not closed, and that was the elephant seal point. We stayed there for a while and watched the lazy creatures. How can one be so lazy? These animals are really interesting!

Despite the closed parks, we didn't arrive at our hotel until 6 pm. We wanted to quickly check in and see Morro Bay. But wait, here we had a serious problem. The hotel had no reservation under our name and they were also surprised by the low price. The lady searched in a phlegmatic manner, hardly said anything, and we also looked dumbfounded. Because one thing we knew: it's high season, it's the weekend, and it was already 6:30 pm. The solution from Days Inn and Booking.com was too destructive for me, practically non-existent. I now realized that the hotel lady still had available rooms, but she didn't want to rent them out for our low price. Booking.com on the phone mentioned that they wanted to "re-locate" us nearby for the cheap price. If the cheap Days Inn chain already charged 199 dollars per night in this location, I didn't want to know where Booking.com wanted to accommodate us nearby and how quickly they wanted to do it. They didn't budge. At some point, I got tired of it and asked if the hotel itself had a free room for us and at what price - suddenly it was only 149 dollars, and I immediately made a decision because more and more people were asking for available rooms. "Our price" was actually 87 dollars - Anyway, we were able to check in at 7 pm and Booking.com will refund the price difference. Nice, but I would call that direct assistance. If I hadn't called Booking.com myself and negotiated with the hotel myself, we would have to sleep in the Jeep now... Not nice, but everything is fine now!

So we just went out to eat and then back to the hotel. Tomorrow is a new day - there are fewer and fewer days left :-(

P.S. The first batch of pictures has now been uploaded in Solvang, a Danish stronghold in the USA.