Pismo Beach

After the trip to Hearst Castle and surrounds we were zapped and headed eagerly to our pre-booked motel in the little seaside resort of Pismo, a surfer's paradise! It was a quiet evening and we retired to bed early to ready ourselves for the tortuous drive into Los Angeles and, more specifically, Anaheim. Imagine my surprise, when I woke up next morning, to see this view from our room. Nice, eh? And the swimming pool is heated.

The motel lay atop quite a steep cliff and I counted the number of steps down when we set off on our early morning walk. It was 110 steps from top to bottom. Pismo beach was very wide and we must have walked about 3km along the sand there and back. It had lots of geological interest and, at one end, some beach volley-ball courts marked out in the sand - like many US beaches I've seen. There were even a few surfers out for an early ride, despite the waves being quite small by Australian standards. Max had great fun exploring caves like the one shown here, and, to our consternation, climbing rock faces - a dodgy activity on the soft rock.

The next picture shows some unusual white rocks at the north end of the beach. My investigation showed that they were not made of chalk. Rather they had a smooth hard, almost igneous, surface. But I am also sure they're not igneous in origin. Help anyone? The same picture also shows an igneous dyke running out from the cliff face - another oddity.

After a morning on the beach, we reluctantly drove into LA via San Louis Obispo and Santa Monica. It was a mostly fine and sunny drive, but the traffic got heavier and heavier the closer we got to LA. We were warned that the freeways are almost always clogged with traffic, except for about 1.00 am!! And so it proved to be. The traffic was horrendous and in many places the often 8 lanes or more of traffic (in both directions) saw cars travelling bumper to bumper at perhaps 10kph. Moreover, it was dark as we tried to find our spot in Anaheim (site of Disneyworld). Fortunately we had a GPS navigation system available, which made the job a lot easier. Don't try to navigate LA without one. The city of 12.8 million inhabitants (the SMSA, not Los Angeles county). They live in a humongously large region 60 miles EW and 40 NS, and it takes hours - even on freeways - to get anywhere. Pubic transport is vanishingly small in volume and doesn't seem to go anywhere we want to travel!

AS