Our route today was meant to be fairly straight forward and simple. We even had high hopes of getting to our destination early.
We originally planned to go straight to Santa Barbara without stopping, but somewhere along the way, decided that was a silly plan.
I had heard that San Simeon was one of the best places to see elephant seals, but the GPS wasn’t pulling anything up -we decided to make a quick stop in Sam Simeon and see if we could find anything.
I did a quick google search (how did people do road trips before cell phones and data?) and discovered the place we were looking for was the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery. It was free, had free parking and was only 3 miles out of the way. Read: Right up our alley!
We made a quick detour and we weren’t sorry! There were SO MANY elephant seals, it was so fun watching them all, we spent a good 20 minutes or so just watching them roll around on top of each other and make random noises, we probably could have stayed a lot longer.
We continued on, but quickly realized that there was a beach coming up that was supposed to be a really nice one. Another quick detour to Pismo beach. There was a lot of pay to park, but we scored a nice spot on the side of the road, got us some Subway and then hit the beach for a lot of fun.
I didn’t take too many pictures because I was busy digging holes and building sandcastles (don’t judge!) but it was a really nice sandy beach. There were a few people there -but it wasn’t overly crowded either.
We made one final stop at a random vista point then turned in for the night.
Tangled Thoughts 