Today Jo & I convinced Dollar to rent us a car so we could begin our road trip. They got their revenge by giving us a ming green focus and convincing us no to use the sat nav until we were out of the city or it wouldn't direct us to the route we wanted….so after reading the instructions on how to drive an automatic and checking some basic highway code we were on our way armed with the map from our bus tour & my iphone compass trying to navigate ourselves out of san fran and onto highway 1 so we could drive down the coast road through the Big Sur National Park rather than down the interstate……but we managed it J and no pedestrians or cyclists were harmed in the process!

It took 9 hours in total but was worth it, the scenery was amazing. As it was December the roads were quiet so we were able to pull over into one of the many laybys & take in the views. If I would do this trip again I would def break up the drive doing it over a couple of days so we could have explored more.

Other highlights from our road trip were too numerous to detail but include seeing a cat when we stopped for lunch, driving along cat canyon road, seeing a town called Westlake, singing along to the Baywatch theme, singing along to Cliff Richard, singing along to bad country Christmas songs & singing along to nothing as there is no radio reception on part of the route and my iphone cable was in my case, doh! We also saw a random man taking photos of his guitar at one of the view points, we drove by the California Mens Colony (turns out it's a prison), we had to try guess how much gas to buy, we ad to try guess what kind of gas to buy, there was smell of spouts as we drove through sprout farms and finally more wine upon arrival at our hotel - oh and because it was a long day it was the first time we stayed up past 11pm!!