Next stop, Morro Bay State Park near Los Osos, CA. From here, we explored the lower half of the Big Sur coastline, including Elephant Seal Beach and the Hearst Castle.

Fat babies resting in the sun.

These are all weaned babies.

The big one is a male, the medium one a female and all the rest are babies.

Seals don't eat while raising babies. We were told that this male was 5000# when he came ashore and is only about 3500# now. The mothers don't eat until the babies are weaned. Then the males and females leave and the weaned babies have to teach themselves to swim so they can go out in the ocean and start feeding. A few of the babies were in the shallow water practicing.




The Hearst Castle is the second largest family home in the United States after the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. But they proudly pointed out that the Hearst Castle has all of it's original furnishings while the Biltmore is mainly reproductions.

What a view!

A guest house

My favorite room, the library!

It is still a working ranch with 80,000 acres in addition to the castle, several guest houses with gorgeous sea and countryside views, gardens, and indoor and outdoor pools. We have lots more pictures if anyone is interested. 😄

We drove up the coast to Gorda, the approximate midpoint of Big Sur. There we had lunch at the Whale Watcher Cafe. The view was fabulous, but we didn't see any whales. The price for food and gas was outrageous, but there was no other place to eat or gas up for many miles!

The next day we visited Morro Rock after which the park is named. We tried to walk to it since it looked close, but after 5 miles we turned back because it still looked a long way off! On the return walk we passed a rookery. We were having trouble finding any nesting birds until we read the sign. Who knew that Blue Herons nested in giant eucalyptus trees? Not me!

The following day we drove to the rock. It was a good thing we turned back the previous day as we still had a long way to go!
        

The rock is a volcanic plug!

The next day we explored another nearby park, Montana de Oro. We walked alongside the Bluff trail and the scene around each curve seemed more beautiful than the last!  

                                                                        
While there we picked up our 500th lifetime geocache. Woo-hoo!

The state park marina had a lovely little beach cafe where we had yummy burritos with local beer and then climbed to the rocky top of the park to watch the sunset. Great way to spend our last day at this park! Heading out to Pinnacles National Park next.