I had originally planned to drive up HWY 1 and take in the coast, but since it was dark, and that is a much, much slower route, I decided to simply take I-5 back north. I'm glad I did because I was able to get within 2 hours of Monterey in just 6 hours even with heavy traffic through LA. I grabbed a hotel room, got up early and realized that since I did not need to get to Carmel until after noon, that I have plenty of time to drive east first and drive up the coast after all.
     The drive was very nice. I love driving up HWY 1, well, not all that much at night or in the rain, but today was sunny and very pleasant and traffic was very light. I stopped repeatedly and took more scenery photos of rocks and waves. There was even this cool Yucca which had bloomed right out on the cliff. The dead flower stock made a really nice subject against the blue sea.

I then had a wonderful meeting and lunch with Lesley and her husband. She picked out even more photos to perhaps someday paint (she has hundreds of my photographs as reference, but always sees something else really cool.

After that I headed back out to the water, only a 15 minute drive away, and photographed my last sunset of this trip out over the water. The surf was up, the tide coming in and the red and yellow light was fantastic against the waves. Once again I kinda went nuts taking photos ;-) However, this did make fitting end for my trip. I started with a sunrise in Indiana and a sunset over the Pacific ocean.

Now for some interesting statistics. This is my first trip with a good digital camera, the Nikon Coolpix 990 which Dr. Klinghammer loaned me. I shot a total of 2117 pictures with this digital camera. I used 527 of these photographs on this site. I would really like to thank Paul Hebert of Interceptmedia for letting me post these on his server -- they take up 40mb of space! And Dr. Klinghammer for letting me use his camera.

One final note. As I was waiting for my flight at SFO I heard a heavily accented voice over the PA system: "Don Juan, please pick up the white courtesy phone. Don Juan, please pick up the white courtesy phone." Then, about half an hour later: " Mary Poppins, please pick up the white courtesy phone. Mary Poppins, please pick up the white courtesy phone."   Somebody was having fun :-)