Wednesday 26th July: Driving Highway 1 - the Pacific Coast Highway

Pescadero Marsh (neat to Highway 1)
Wednesday 26th July 11.45am 60 degrees F (foggy)
sepia ink and coloured pencil in Moleskine sketchbook 8" x 10"

Louise dropped me off at San Diego at about airport at about 5.30am so that I could catch the 6.45 flight to San Francisco and then the connecting flight to Monterey which would get me in about 9.00am. Almost the first thing I heard when I got to the check-in queue was that the San Francisco flight was late and I'd miss my connection.

We'll draw another veil over the next hour or so except to say I declined the offer from United Airlines of a replacement flight which would get me into Montery at 8.00pm in the evening [raised eyebrow smiley!] and accpted the offer of a credit voucher to be used on a subsquent flight. Instead I flew to San Francisco and picked up a car there which fortunately was not a big deal as it could have been (thumbs up for Alamo!).

We'll just have a minor digression here while I remember what it was like in the airport car park trying to drive an automatic car for the 2nd time ever. Here's the car later on in the trip. Fortunately it was a car which I had driven before - with gears.

I drove from San Francisco International down to Half Moon Bay to the south and west of san Francisco to pick up (State Route) Highway 1 - the Pacific Coast Highway. It is reputed to have some beautiful coastline and is designated an All-Americian highway. My intention was to drive down it as far as a I could.

I was following Ed Terpening's (of the "Life Plein Air" blog) draft resume of places to to paint down the coast of California - which was excellent at leading me to the two locations identified in these sketches.

While Ed's instructions were excellent, I wasn't quite prepared for the extent of the fog (marine inversion?) along the coastline - everything was very grey - and the temperature had dropped 50 degrees from that experienced on Monday - only two days earlier. It was quite an adjustment trying to get the colours right after days and days of bright blue skies - in fact it felt very like the grey cloudy day we had going through the Sonoran Desert on Monday morning.

The first sketch (at the top of the post) is annotated with my code for different colours in order to provide extra assistance in working this one up at home .

Bean Hollow Beach
26.7.06. 12.25pm 61 degrees F
sepia ink and coloured pencil on Mole sketchbook 8" x 10"

Dinner that evening was at "The Fishwife" on Sunset Drive at Asilomar Beach This is the dinner menu. It's reputed have very good seafood. I know I wasn't disappointed - and I got a good table to sketch from. The people on the right came over afterwards - they had realised what I was doing and were delighted to be in the sketch!

The Fishwife (seafood restaurant), Sunset Drive, Pacific Grove
26.7.06. 8.00pm
pen and ink and coloured pencil in Moleskine sketchbook 8" x 10"

Links:

• Pacific Coast Highway
• Pescadero Marsh - State Beach and Marsh
  
• Bean Hollow Beach - State Beach
  
• The Fishwife, Sunset Drive at Asilomar, Pacific Grove Tel: (831) 375 7107(831) 375 7107

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