Morro Rock
Started: 2023-07-15 21:40:55
Submitted: 2023-07-15 22:49:39
Visibility: World-readable
A large rock marking the line between the ocean and the bay
My vague plan for our second full day camping at San Simeon, after visiting Hearst Castle the day before, was to go to the beach somewhere near our campground. We live in Santa Cruz, so we can go to our local beaches just about whenever we want, but every beach in California is unique in its own special way, so I still like visiting beaches further from home.
This plan morphed into a trip down highway 1 into Morro Bay when we realized that we had neglected to bring any reading material for Julian. There were a couple of small bookstores in the nearby town of Cambria, but none of the looked nearly as inspiring as Coalesce Bookstore.
while packing for the trip, I couldn't find the coffee strainer I've used for years, so I took a last-minute trip to REI to get a camp stove percolator coffee maker. This works by capturing hot water at the bottom of the pot, funneling so it splashes onto grounds at the top of the pot, then repeating the process until the coffee is brewed. This worked well enough, though I probably would have been happier with the smaller, 3-cup size (which the manufacturer produces, but REI doesn't carry) than the larger 6-cup size that REI does carry.
After breakfast, we drove half an hour down the coast to the city of Morro Bay. As we approached we saw a large rock looming in the distance, shrouded in fog; this turned out to be Morro Rock, one of the city's landmarks, marking the entry to the bay. We found Coalesce Bookstore in the middle of town and browsed its eclectic collection, including a selection of local-interest books (with a couple of books on Hearst Castle, including a different biography of architect Julia Morgan than Kiesa had purchased at Hearst Castle the day before).
We ended up purchasing a giant stack of books, more than the "two per person" goal we had walked into the store with. We can never have too many books, though we do have some problem with our shelf space to store the books.
For lunch we headed across town to the beach next to Morro Rock. The clouds were gradually clearing and it was briefly sunny at the parking lot next to the beach. The beach was crowded with people but there was space for us to sit down, set out the beach blanket, and eat lunch on the beach.
We had a vague idea that we might head back in the direction of San Simeon to find a beach to lounge on, but the beach we were already on seemed perfectly adequate for the task. (I had no doubt that there was a selection of stunning tiny beaches along the coast all the way back to San Simeon, many of them accessed by narrow trails from small parking spaces by the highway, but I wasn't sure how many of them I could find.) I dug a shallow moat to claim our space on the beach while the rest of my family read the books they had just acquired.
I took a walk up the beach to catch Morro Rock in its full size with my regular lens on my Nikon DSLR. (My primary lens is the 18-140 mm DX zoom lens that came as the kit lens with my D5200 a decade ago. This is a good general-purpose lens but sometimes I want a wider lens, especially when photographing interiors; a wide lens also would have come in handy to capture the full bulk of Morro Rock visible from the beach. I have a wide lens on my iPhone that I use when I can't get a sufficiently-wide view on my real camera.)
On my way back I walked to the other side of the dunes lining the back of the beach to get a better view of the triple stacks of the now-decommissioned Morro Bay power plant.
After a few hours on the beach we considered leaving so we'd have a chance to drive back to our campground in advance of my family's group video call scheduled at 16:00 PDT. When we reached the parking lot we saw a long line of cars also trying to leave the parking lot, and we decided there was no chance that we could actually get out of the parking lot in time. The wireless coverage in the parking lot seemed good enough that I could probably join the call from the parking lot. This left half an hour before call, so we walked across the tiny spit of land separating the beach from the bay (where there were a surprisingly large number of sea otters lounging in the water next to shore), then continued along the bay to the south side of Morro Rock.
On the far side of Morro Rock, where the jetty protecting the harbor stretched out into the ocean, we found a large area where narrow towers of rocks had been stacked on the ground. Most were five or six rocks tall, but some were taller, carefully constructed out of rocks that tapered to a point.
The rock towers had no obvious meaning, except that there was enough building material and space time to build the towers in the space between the bay and the ocean.
We headed back to the car to join my family's video call. By this point a traffic cop had appeared and was directing traffic, routing all of the cars exiting my parking lot into a single path to optimize traffic flow by reducing the amount of contention between sources of traffic. I sat in the car, charging my phone from the car battery, and barely managed enough wireless coverage that I could catch a glimpse of my newest nibbling (born early Saturday morning) before I decided that the best way to optimize my connection was to turn off all video. I could hear my siblings and parents on the call, but I couldn't talk; I had to use the text chat and then I'd hear my words read back to me followed by the response.
We ate supper at an Italian restaurant in Morro Bay, then drove back up the coast to our campsite at San Simeon for the night.
