PCH - Monterey - San Jose

Driving up Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Barbara we found elephant seals, roads covered in rockfalls from the sheer cliffs, and expansive views of the coast. It was a great drive.

Even though it's a "highway" you can't do more than 40MPH due to the continual curves and sheer drops on the other side. The road is basically cut into the cliff and follows the contours of the mountains around the coast. Every turn revealed something new and amazing - "ohhh, wow" we kept saying.

Eventually the road turns into the forests of "Big Sur" but it still feels remote and curvaceous until you pop out at Carmel ("a dream place" according to Jannie, due to it's pretty tree lined main street that slopes down to a lovely beach).

It's then a short drive to Monterey where we spent the night. Monterey is always lovely, with pretty houses and seaside. The next morning we saw butterflies and deer at the butterly sanctuary and continued the drive to Santa Cruz, which although pretty is definitely a part of Northern California as the wind was icy cold. Definitely not shorts weather up here.

Deciding to give it a miss, we headed over the mountain to San Jose where we both enjoyed being back in the city, in the heart of "Silicone Valley". I never knew that San Jose is the 10th largest city in the US. It feels so much like a small town. Everything seems to be a ten minute drive from wherever you are.

The way we found the hotel was totally appropriate. We dropped into the Holiday Inn Express to go to the bathroom and to find out their rates only to be told it was $160. That's $240 AUD! Totally outrageous. (Walk in rates always suck - we paid $60 at another hi express and the person ahead was paying $16 on some corporate rate). Anyway, we asked if there was free wifi around. They looked at us and said they had no idea.

So we went out to the car and checked - it turned out there was free wifi from the hotel across the street, so we drove around with the laptop to find the strongest signal, then booked a room with hotwire.com for another holiday inn for the much more acceptable rate of $60.

San Jose is business town - everyone here is geeky or business like, tapping away on laptops or PDAs but it's still kind of fun. It has nice mountains on each side and is 45 minutes to San Francisco and 45 minutes to Santa Cruz.

Jannie finished buying her ski clothes here - total cost for funky warm waterproof jacket, pants and gloves is $100 (the jacket is last season's style - oh the shame).

We also went to the IMAX dome for Adrenaline Rush and saw the Tech Museum of Innovation.

So now we are all set for an adventure to Lake Tahoe - and skiing if there is any snow to be found.