junk mail, and all mail for that matter. Actually all residents have to have post
office boxes. We therefore soon stumbled across the post office, the biggest
and busiest building, and asked for a map of the town. Once again we were
helped by an ex-patriot... we Brits get everywhere. She recommended a little
café, Friar Tuck’s, for lunch, and gave us a huge map labelled with every
shop.
And there are a lot of shops. These include Saks and various exclusive
boutiques, which we decided not to go into for fear of being charged for
looking at the goods.
After a healthy lunch of salad - in buns with meat patties, cheese and
bacon - we found a library for a sneaky free hour on the Internet and then
went to the beach for a bit. We could not stay long unfortunately because it
was late afternoon and we still had about 20 slow coast road miles to go to
our final destination for the day - Big Sur State Park.
The Big Sur area of the Californian coast is a collection of several different
state parks and beaches. It provides beautiful views of the ocean and lots of
places to hike, either along the coast itself or slightly inland among coastal
redwoods. What I cannot tell you is why it is called Big Sur, though I would
like to believe it was originally ‘Big Surf’, but somewhere through the years the
‘f’ has dropped off.
We were going to spend two nights in the area, so that we could have
a whole day walking. We had the pick of several different campsites, nowhere
was busy at that time of year, and headed towards the state one because a
friend in the UK had recommended it to us. However, when we pulled up at