Nodding donkey, seeking oil

Tuna

Saturday 04 May 2024

We had such a lovely day planned for our drive from Santa Maria to Monterey/Salinas. Highway 1 crawls up the coast with the ocean on onside and the Santa Lucia Mountain Range on the other side. It looked like it would be a lovely drive and we could take out time. However, we found out that a couple of spots of Hwy 1 are closed due to rock falls and fixing of roads. There are not many roads that you can cut across back to the freeway, we did find one but it looked like a single lane road with 50 million hairpin turns. So, we couldn’t do our nice coast drive and had to pound up freeway 101.

Interesting ‘sights’ along the way to Salinas were:
  • Salina River Cogen Plant (acres of nodding donkeys seeking oil).
  • The 101 follows the El Camino Real (King’s Road) which linked the 20+ missions (mid 1700s onwards) that the Spanish built from San Francisco through to the tip of Baja California Sur in Mexico.
  • It started raining, quite heavily at times. The Brick in now the cleanest it has been in 2 months and all that good Utah brown mud is now gone. However, we could see much better out of all the windows.
We were into Salinas earlier than expected so started looking for somewhere for lunch. We found a good Mexican place on Google Maps, which got over 4.5 stars and had great reviews. Arriving there we could see that it was very popular and the car park was full. However once inside, there were predominately a take away place, the only table they had were on the patio, which were currently being soaked by the rain. On to out second choice a lunch, which worked out. Still raining and getting quite cold.

Post lunch we headed off to the supermarket to get some supplier, which took us past the California Rodeo Salinas arena. No rodeo happening but they did have Monster Trucks. There were some hardcore fans out in the rain taking selfies in from of the trucks. I tried to take some photos from the car.




We have a very pretty, well renovated two bedroom cottage for the next few nights.