More driving along the Coast

We had to get to LA in two days from San Francisco, not a big deal but we wanted to go along the coast which always takes a bit longer.

Our first stop was a State Park where you could see elephant seals, pretty nice animals.

But first we had to walk for about one hour.

And soon we could see the first elephant seal, the males have a big nose, that's why they are called elephant seals.

They are pretty big, male can weigh up to 2000 kg, as much as a F-150 (that's what the park ranger said). They are also pretty slow on ground, I think it took that big dude about 5 min. to get onto the beach. This is one reasons why they were almost extinguished because they were so easy to hunt. Now their population is increasing (at least that's what the signs at the visitor centre said).

They swim up and down the coast and go as far north as Alaska. Since they are so long in the water their skin gets pretty bad so they have to hang out on the beach for a while. The male swim up to 5000 km twice a year, pretty impressive.

Most of them are just lying on the beach ...

But a few of them (the males) are practicing fights. At this time of the year they are not really fighting since they are not mating yet. It is more a play.

They are putting their heads up in the air and try to show off.

Later on during the year they really fight, they fight for females. It is a really interesting story. Male get around 13 years old, female around 22. Only 5% of the males are going to mate, the other 95% don't, in their whole life. If you win those fights and you are the superhero you have a harem of about 30 female, you must be quite busy. The year after you are already to weak to win the fights and soon after that you are going to die. Not too sure if I want to be a male seal elephant, I guess if you belong to the lucky 5% your life is amazing, if not, well, ...

After we saw enough laziness we left and came by some amazing sand dunes.

We continued the drive along the coast and saw a bunch of kite surfers. They actually used real surf big boards and not kite boards which are a lot shorter, pretty amazing.

We came through Santa Cruz. Originally we wanted to go riding here but it was pretty warm and we were running a bit out of time if we want to be in LA tomorrow night so we skipped the riding. The town looked pretty cool, no wonder a lot of famous sport brands come from here, Santa Cruz Bikes, Santa Cruz Snowboards (I had one of those back in the day) and other stuff. Actually I am not too sure if the stuff comes from here but the brands are called Santa Cruz. I think there are a bunch of cities around the world which are called Santa Cruz.

More driving along the coast south of Santa Cruz.

I think this is one of my favourite pictures, the colours are just amazing.

Cool bridge, it was build in 1932.

A waterfall onto a sand beach, not too sure if I have seen that before.

It was getting late so we had to find a camp ground, wasn't that easy actually. We went to two state parks, they were all full.

So we ended up on a piece of dirt on the side of the road, this was our view. Good night.

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