Day 4 - Morro Bay

On Tuesday, we spent the day around Morro Bay. We drove up from Pismo Beach and found Frankie & Lola's Front Street Cafe' where we enjoyed an excellent breakfast. After walking around the harbor for a bit, we drove out to the rock and walked a little on the beach by the jetty. We enjoyed watching the sea lions in the channel, saw a possum sunning on the rocks, and sighted a perigrine falcon up on the cliffs. We also stopped for a few minutes to watch the surfers at Morro Strand State Beach. Tuesday was a beautiful day, calm and warm, and it continued to get better as the day progressed.

We then drove out to Montana de Oro State Park. After visiting the beach at Spooner's Cove, we hiked out on the Bluff Trail and enjoyed all the stupendous views of the coastline.

 We walked down to Corralina Cove and went out into the tidepools. We enjoyed watching the egrets flying around and walking into the tidepools not too far away from us.
 
Here's a great website that has a description and pictures of the Bluff Trail:

http://www.hikespeak.com/trails/montana-de-oro-bluff-trail/

Unfortunately, the park information center was closed on Tuesdays but there were a lot of people using the park that day. There are many miles of trails. Montana de Oro is one of the largest California state parks and has a campground, hiking, bicycling, and equestrian trails. Because of some arrangement with San Luis Obispo County, the park has no entrance fee although we read in the local paper that that might change in the future since the state needs to generate some income to maintain the park.

After leaving the Spooner's Cove area of the park, we headed back towards the entrance and drove down Sand Spit Road to a parking lot and walked the trail down to the beach. The Sand Spit Beach is about four miles long and the views are breathtaking with Morro Rock and the coast near San Simeon visible in the distance. This is one of the most awesome beaches that I have seen in Northern or Central California, rivaling the beaches of Point Reyes and the Sonoma Coast. And, except for two surfer dudes, we were the only ones on it.

After driving back through Los Osos, we drove back to Morro Bay and into Morro Bay State Park. This is also a beautiful park with a fine campground, marina, and museum. There's a very small fee to enter the museum but none to enter the park. The museum is excellent with many interesting displays about the estuary and the plants and animals that inhabit it. There's also an outside deck from which you can watch the sea birds and sea lions feeding in the channel. The sea lions were particularly active while we were there and we were thankful that the museum had a bunch of binoculars that we could use.

Later, back at the resort, we caught another sunset and green flash and then it was on to an excellent dinner at the Cracked Crab, one of our favorite restaurants along the Central Coast.