We first hit rain on Highway 17, heading down towards Santa Cruz. In typical autumn fashion, the pass was cold, damp, and pea-soup foggy. But, we reasoned, at least the rain was over with early on in the trip! This, kids, is foreshadowing.

We hopped onto southbound Highway 1 in Santa Cruz, which took us though the heavily agricultural area around Castroville. I love riding through this area; even though the scenery isn't very interesting (unless you like artichoke fields), it always smells wonderfully -- raspberries, strawberries, nuts, fruit. We made the requisite stop at the Thistle Hut roadside stand, and I picked up some exquisite raspberries. They were so fresh that they crunched when I bit them, and then melted in my mouth. Yum!

We stopped for lunch in Carmel-by-the-Sea, which always makes me think fondly of Accardi-by-the-Sea in Beyond Zork. It should probably concern me how many things in my life have some sort of Zork connotation to me.

Carmel is so amazingly pretentious that it's actually pretty fun to wander around. Looking around from our lunch table, I could see Saks Fifth Avemue, Talbots, Ann Taylor, and four (four!) jewelry stores. Heh. We are so not the target demographic for this city.

After lunch, we headed south on Highway 1, which is pretty much anyone's ideal motorcycling road: gorgeous scenery, swoopies, plenty of photo opportunities. In fact, the only real downside is the traffic. Hoardes of RVers and other vacationers line up along Highway 1, and become instantly oblivious to the fact that fifteen thousand cars are piled up behind them.

At one of the many turnouts, it occurred to me that my camera lens was all fogged up, assumedly from the mist/fog going over Highway 17. It wouldn't clear up, despite our attempts at warming the lens, spitting on it, rubbing it with a glasses cloth, etc. So, my pictures are really annoyingly fuzzy. Sigh.

About halfway down the coast, it started to get a bit cloudy. A bit cloudy turned into grey and dank. Grey and dank turned into drizzle. I still had my dark visor on, and it started to get a little uncomfortable. At one point, we ended up being behind another couple on their motorcycle; we followed their taillight for a while. It was getting hard to see. We rounded a corner and saw a pickup truck flag down the first motorcycling couple -- we all pulled over. Turned out it was a support truck for a local bicycle race; while we were stopped to talk, I pulled off my helmet and changed my visor to the clear shield....right as the skies opened and the rain started pouring down. The motorcycling couple got a trash bag from the pickup truck to cover up some camera equipment, and we got wetter and wetter. By the time we got going again, we were soaked. My nice waterproof jacket? Well, turns out that when you forget to put ScotchGuard back on it after washing it, it ain't so waterproof.

20 miles of bone-chilling downpour later, we arrived in Cambria to a bunch of "no vacancy" signs. We stopped at the Creekside Inn to ask if they had any recommendations, only to find that they'd just had a cancellation. Score!

I was so proud of Peter -- he really hates riding in the rain, and he did really really well. He was a very good sport about getting sopping wet with no cold-weather gear, the poor thing.

Fortunately, by the time we changed into dry clothes (thank goodness for waterproof Givi hard luggage!!), it had stopped raining enough to walk to dinner. We wandered around Cambria, getting muddy but not soaking wet, and finally stopped at Lombardi's Italian Restaurant for amazing food, a bottle of wine, and chocolate mousse pie.

At some point, we decided to try to come up with the Seven Wonders of the World, and failed miserably. Eventually, the people at the next table overheard us and tried to think of more, too, but even between the four of us, we could only remember 3 or 4.

After dinner, we wandered around and ended up in a great conversation with Patrick, who was working the Rumplestiltskin Book Gallery down the street from Lombardi's. He gave us some maps and told us about some great-sounding hikes in the area. Apparently, there's a huge ranch right in the middle of Cambria, where the city bought a bunch of land and is refusing to develop on it. It looks like a great place to hike if it weren't, y'know, raining.

Part 2: Hearst Castle and Morro Rock