day 5 - 17 Mile Drive and Hair Raising Cliffs

Once we left Monterey we headed a little bit south to 17 Mile Drive. This is the most beautiful drive with luxurious homes on it.

Some of the homes seem quite ordinary (to say the least), but others are almost castles! The winding roads create a really neat place to live. The scenery was breathtaking as the coast areas all seem to be.

Pebble Beach

We completed over half of the drive at a leasurely pace and saw harbour seals and the Lone Cypress and beautiful pebble beaches, before we picked up speed and headed for the highway.

Harbour Seals

Before we went to the highway I took the kids to a picnic spot on Pebble Beach and they played on the shore, running from waves for 20 minutes or so. They also each brought home a large 'pebble' as a souvenir of their trip. We will make something special with them.

The Lone Cypress - Most Photographed Tree

When we hit the highway, again I wasn't thinking and I shot for Highway 1, not remembering that Highway 1 went all the way down the coast. I should have gone back to the 101. Finally after about 20 km or so of treachurous cliffs I suddenly clued in that something was wrong. The night I had driven down the Oregon Coast in the rain and dark I had no clue what was outside the window. I found out later that it was cliffs and if I had known this I probably would have been freaked out. I don't even like driving from our house to the coast at night, because of the cliffs and here I was driving all this unknown territory in the dark and bucketing down rain!

I pulled over and asked someone about the directions and they told me it was only about another 40 miles until the end of the cliffs. I chose to continue along the coast. Well, they were way wrong!! I ended up driving about 80 miles on these cliffs. We prayed for the rain to stop and the cliffs to be gone before dark!! As it turned out the rain did stop and we got out of the cliffs in the nick of time. Just minutes before headlights became necessary! The cliffs were actually at times (much of the way) hairpin turns, 500 - 1000' drops and very narrow!

You can see the road above where the cliff juts in a tiny bit - no guard rails!

This is very cool. You can't see much, but there is a castle up there and a lighthouse and a private road leading all the way out to where our car was. It is now a state park type thing.