Jack Kerouac didn't travel with 3 kids

(With any luck, this post will appear half way into our Yosemite adventure; we'll see if this works when we get back to Albuquerque)....

Monday afternoon we drove west for a few hours to California's central "gold coast."  The drive was a rural one and very beautiful; definitely golden rolling hills this time of year.  We decided at the last minute to Hotwire a hotel and wound up at a great little place across the street from the dock below in Morro Bay, CA.  We also considered Pismo Beach and were happy we wound up in this little fishing town rather than the typical big, busy beach town.  Down on the "Embarcadero" you could almost sleep in the street there were so few cars.  Staying in the middle of the week in October helps too...

No amount of post processing can fix this photo.  I looked and looked for the muscle button to no avail.  We hit up the hot tub twice while we where there.  Duck duck goose is pretty fun when you are 4 and 2.

We went on a short walk down the street to see what we could find.  Allie found this cool tree.  (By the way, I used our new ultra-wide Sigma for most of the photos on this post).  

Allie found this dock and ran down to to the end to see what was going on.  We found these two Phillipeano guys fishing off the dock for sardines and spanish macrel.  They were nice and fun to chat with.  The grocery sack hooked to the white box behind Allie is full of fish.  The guy tried to get Allie to hold one, and she almost did but got a bit scared in the end.  Luke was too scared.  Luke and Allie kept looking into the disgusting sack to see the wiggly fish so would "have to" wash their hands off with the the sprayer behind them.  

Our little Allie is quite the fearless wanderer - almost to a fault.  At church Sunday she went right into Primary without looking back (like she did in nursery as a 1 year old).  On our way back Tuesday, we stopped at Pismo Beach where she ran off chasing a gull without ever thinking twice.  Below you see her after running off and finding this interesting staircase with cool seaweed at the bottom.

Wesley and his sister (yea, we need to trim his hair a bit so people don't think he's a girl).
At the end of our walk we found a cool little city park with these interesting trees.  The park had a pirate ship that the kids thought was super cool.

Wesley swimming with the dolphins. 

I woke up Tuesday morning and went on a walk while Joy and the kids slept.  We stayed on the nicer end of the embarcadero.  The opposite end has some commercial fishing interests and a power plant (the whole walk is ~ 1.5mi).  The gull below is not lit real well, the sun was just on Morro Rock behind it.  This rock is a volcanic plug and is now a paregrine falcon preserve and as such covered almost completely in white (hmmm... as Lindsay would say).

Here we have Ms. Allie climbing on an anchor in the city park.  She asked me what these letters said.  We ate dinner Monday night at an Italian restaurant.  Joy and I had some great fish.  Allie on the other hand was given a menu (with no pictures) and was looking it over and loudly told us "what am I going to eat, I can't even read!"

Here are some of the nicer commercial fishing boats before sunrise Tuesday. 

And a detail of one of the not so nice ones.  The next time you eat a fillet-o-fish, think of me.

...sunset Monday night walking back to our hotel...

We missed Jay, Ilene and Andrew.  Jay had to work of course, Andrew wasn't feeling so hot, and Ilene ended up watching some kids after school so they ended up staying home on the farm.