October 20

Today we headed out on the bus trip to the Hearst Castle, with a stop Elephant Seal Rookery.  In late November and early December the adult male seals, weighing over two tons,arrive at the rookery and threaten, intimidate or, if necessary, fight for dominance over portion of the beach.  The battles can be both dramatic and bloody but seldom cause any life threatening injury.  But today all we seen was a lot of Juvenal males doing a lot of play roles of dominance here on the beach.

 You can tell these are not the big boys, but they are practicing for when they get their chance.

 A lot of them just enjoying the warm sand!!!

 I think I need more sand on my back!!!
Our next stop was  Hearst Castle.

What a castle, this was taken from down by highway 1.

 Our first stop was the visitor center for information, tickets, something to eat, and then off to the I MAX Theater to watch a movie on the building of this place.

 After the movie, we head out for our tour of the castle main rooms,

 Here are a couple of pictures of the main rooms in the house, this happens to be the dinning room.

 This was the smoking room and game room after the dinner was served.

 Indoor pool.

 This is looking doen to the beach from the house.

We had a great day and it is hard to beleive that we are getting close to the end of this trip, just 6 days left.  It is going way to fast, don't want to see these people go.

October 19

What a great day we had, up at 7:00 to put out coffee for the guest.  Then after a great sunrise it was time to watch everyone hooking up to leave the park for Paso Robles, CA.  The first ones were out by 9:00 AM for a 102 mile drive. to the Vines RV Resort in Paso Robles. The last one out was us at 11:00 AM, and it was a nice drive after we were on 101.  Set the cruise control at 56 and went just about 80 miles before we had to pull off for the park.  This park has only been open for just two years and is really nice.  All of the parking areas are cement and really nice, I would give it a 10,10,10.

 As we were sitting down for our Pizza Party I noticed this great sun set.

 This gives you a little bit at how nice this park is.  After our Pizza Party, we had our travel brief and we did our White Elephant.  Every rig was to bring something that they may not need but someone else may like to have it.  We asked not to spend more than $5.00 for the gift then put them in a paper bag.  It was a lot of fun and we had some great gifts from Wine to pot holders and a bunch of DVD's.

 But the best was this Turkey Hat, Teresa made David put it on.

 But then David said that seens she picked it she had to put it on!!!

Everyone had a great time.  Tomorrow we head out on a bus trip to Hearst Castle, we haven't been there in a long time.  Looking forward to the trip.

October 18

This morning we woke up to know power.  We are to go on a bus tour today down to Monterey Aquarium and Cannery Row.  So after firing up the gen set and making coffee for the guest, we left for Monterey at about 9:45 AM.  At first we heard that the power would be back on by 9:30 AM, well that came and went with no power.  So we opened the windows for the boys and off we went on our tour.

Our first stop was the Monterey Bay Aquarium, it has the rating as the best Aquarium in the world.

The weather is great, the temp is only about 70 degrees which makes for a good day.
here are a few things that we seen inside.

We didn't stay here very long because we wanted to go down to Bubba Gumps for lunch on Cannery Row.

As we were walking down to here we noticed that a lot of shops not opened, and low and behold the power was out here in Monterey.  So the only place that had power was the Aquarium.  So we head back there to get something to eat before we head out on the rest of our bus tour.

 We went by a lot of Golf Coarse on the 17 mile Pebble Beach Drive.  Our next stop was at the Migrating Monarch Butterflies Nesting Trees, this area is protect for the Monarch Butterflies.  It was neat seeing a few of them here.  They say that during the Migration that 100's of them can be seen here.  They start showing up around the first of October  and by November they are covering these trees.  Here are just a few of the pictures I took.

 We were here for about 20 minutes then off we went for the drive on 17 mile drive.

Our next stop was at the oldest Cypress along the coast.

 Once again we were back on the bus towards Carmel, so the wife's can go shopping for a couple of hours.

 The wife's may be happy but I don't know about the husbands.

 At least our two wife's came out of this store with no bags.

 This dog made a great door stop.

 We all had a great day and the wife's didn't brake the bank and we all had a great time.  Tomorrow we move again down the coast about a 100 miles to a town called Paso Robles, CA.  We will be here 2 nights with a trip to the Hearst Castle.  We haven't been there in over 30 years, so it will be a great visit again.

October 17

We have been a little busy lately, but we are currently in Monterey staying at the Dunes RV Park.  We are right next to the coast.  I am going to back up a few day to when we were at Yosemite National Park.  We spent one day driving around Yosemite and had a great time.

 We stopped along the way at El Capitan to watch a few climbers going up the face.

 When we stopped at Bridalveil Fall and only seen just a small amount of water coming over it.

 We drove up to Tunnel View to see the whole valley.

We enjoyed a great day in the park and here are a few pictures of some animals we seen.

The park has really been dry lately with no rain in site, I hope they don't have anymore fires.  While we were their we didn't see any sign of fires around where we were.  But we were lucky to see a few animals. I missed a picture of a few deer but these guys were really wanting a picture.

Here are a few of our guest enjoy the park.
While at our camp grounds we had a few turkeys wondering around.

Every morning we seen them coming out of the trees and walking around the camp.

This is our group after a great breakfast at Miner's Roadhouse, look at all the smiling faces, they must have had a great breakfast.
Tomorrow we are going on a bus tour of Monterey Aquarium, Cannery Row, Fisherman's Wharf ,
Pacific Grove, Migrating Monarch Butterflies Nesting Trees and 17-Mile Drive & Carmel City Tour, it should be a great day.