Day 33 - 34: Highway 1 & Five Guys

On Thursday we had a non-planned driving day from Santa Barbara. While our very handy navigator that came with the car shows the initial distances with bird routes, it can give quite some optimistic mileages to Monterey. In reality, it means driving parts of serpentine Highway 1 with 20 miles/hr :-) Highway 1 is really beautiful following the coast line on the Pacific. We started from the Atlantic around 5 weeks ago, swam at the Gulf of Mexico and now we reached the Pacific. Kind of cool.

We saw some breath-taking coastal views. Soon after we were talking about it would be not nice to get into an accident here, since help,would take ages to get there with no towns near, the road was closed. It turned out to be a motorcycle accident and soon after we saw a helicopter approaching. Not nice :-(

Suddenly there was a sign for elephant seals. Since it sounded good we decided to stop. And we found a shoreful of elephant seals chilling out (and molting as in shedding their skin). They were sleeping, making funny noises and having complex social movements going on including crawling over each other and stealing each others sleeping places. After seals we stopped for a coke in Big Sur and continued our way to Salinas. It was quite late when we ended up there so we searched a hotel (full of Corvette's!) and headed for the Five Guys. Hearing a lot about them our expectations were high. They are for many the best burger chain in the US. We ordered two cheeseburgers and one set of fries, and after waiting quite some time it turned out our order was not printed. After some additional waiting we got two huge burgers and 5kg worth of potatoes. The burgers were really good and incredibly unhealthy.

The next day our breakfast was one apple, and our lunch were two mini sandwiches (sliders). We also decided to skip the dinner.. Phew. On Friday we decided to drive closed to Yosemite, to Fresno. There we found a bookstore and sent again few hours there (including morning tea) and after that headed for the Visitor Bureau to check for places to go. However it turned out that Visitor Bureau is not the same as Visitor Center, and we ended up wondering in some abandonded looking office hallways. Later on we learned the place is "a membership-based organization dedicated to promoting and marketing Fresno City and County as a visitor and meeting destination." Ookay....

For the evening we found a nice motel with pool, internet, store near-by and free home-baked cookies! Perrrrrrfect.

Few completely unrelated notions:

• USA Today must be the worst newspaper ever. While in real news there are real stories, U-Today is focusing on writing about trivial non-sense from the La-la-land. The worst part being that while eg. People is openly a gossip magazine, this newspaper tries to still be a serious newspaper.
• The presidential campaigns have started and the current focus is on how Obama pushed some girl when he was ten and how Romney allegedly bullied some boy at school once. The guy is over 70! Aren't there really more relevant things to judge whether someone can be the leader of the USA?
• The Fox News radio station can be listened to max 30mins per day before smoke come out of the ears.
• The commercials by the sides of the road are quite amazing (or who decides to have a vasectomy while standing in a traffic jam? And also the lawyers are very willing to help in traffic accident/DUI related lawsuits)
• Would you call to numbers such as 1-800-GET-THIN (surgery to reduce the size of your stomach), 1-800-EARS (to get hearing aid), or 1-800-NOTICKET (get rid of your speeding ticket)
• While the worry seems to be in whether Spain can survive the Euro crisis, why don't people worry of the hundreds of companies here that offer payday loans (get money now, pay when you get your salary with "small" interest), title loans (sell your car to the company and lease with "affordable price"), bail bond companies (if someone bails you out from prison do you then owe them your soul?) and our favorite, the combined pawn & gun shops. Would you like to go negotiate back your stuff you pawned while the owner has handy access to AK-47's and Smith&Wessons...