California coast escape

2 Days, 40 Miles

Pinnacles N.M. to Monterey Peninsula

"The hour of the pearl," John Steinbeck called it: The early-morning fog hangs low over Monterey Bay and muffles the calls of seagulls and the barks of sea lions as we walk past the Victorians of Pacific Grove, bound for Cannery Row.

The mist obscures the crossovers, the bridges used to transport millions of sardines during the heyday of Monterey's fishing industry. Fishing boats with upturned bows and low-slung sterns bob along the Monterey Harbor, with its corrugated-iron buildings and lines of heavy wheelbarrows for transporting fish. Otters swim close enough to hear them chew, and I prove my theory to Becky that every harbor has at least one boat named Sea Wolf.

 Later in the day we head to Carmel, where people don't name boats, they name cottages. My tastes run more toward the rusted and weathered, so I find today's Carmel quotidianly quaint. We watch as husbands, hearing that most dreaded of spousal orders ― "Honey, let's go in here" ― look on with envy at jovial foursomes of guys straight off the 18th hole at Pebble Beach. Fortunately, Becky is not a professional shopper, and soon we veer off into the side streets, where we're able to get more of the feeling of the old arts colony that was home to some of the greatest artists that California ever produced: poet Robinson Jeffers and photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

The fog comes back just in time for our hike at Point Lobos State Reserve, south of Carmel. Harbor seals haul out in hidden coves, and the fog drifts through a grove of rare Monterey cypress, where lace lichen dangles from the branches and an orange algae crusts the trunks. Here nature is more perfect than art: wind-sculpted trees placed just so on granite rocks rhythmically washed by waves rising from a jade-colored sea.

Road food

Café Quackenbush. Gourmet sandwiches and art gallery just off U.S. 101. $; lunch Tue- Sun, breakfast Sat- Sun. 458 Bell St., Los Alamos; 805/ 344-5181.

Fiala's Gourmet Deli, Espresso Bar & Chocolatier. Italian deli with outstanding panini sandwiches in Edna Valley wine country. $; 8-5 daily. 1653 Old Price Canyon Rd., San Luis Obispo; 805/543-1313.

Taco Temple. A great spot for fish tacos, hidden on a State 1 frontage road. $; lunch and dinner Wed-Mon. 2680 Main St., Morro Bay; 805/772-4965.

2 Days, 30 Miles

Monterey Peninsula to Big Sur

Trailed by a collie mix, the woman appears in the doorway of the Henry Miller Memorial Library at Big Sur. Clad in a fuzzy fake-fur coat, she's in her 70s and is carrying some paintings. It takes a moment before the library and cultural center's director, Magnus Toren, notices her, but the woman turns out to be the day's speaker, Gui de Angulo Mayo. Gui, who chronicled San Francisco's Beat Generation in photographs, is here to discuss her biography of her father, Jaime de Angulo, a legendary Big Sur figure and celebrated Native American linguist and anthropologist.

I had already decided to buy the book before Gui arrived, and she signs it as Toren praises her work. "Well, I think it's accurate," she says simply, then explains how her father didn't think Henry Miller was very smart and mostly ignored the author and painter who settled in Big Sur in 1944.

It's very much a Big Sur moment: slightly eccentric and wholly serendipitous. Gui, after all, provides a connection through her father to that pre-State Highway 1 Big Sur, when it was an even more pristine and wild frontier than it is today. "What a scene!" Jaime de Angulo wrote as he rode horseback down the coast on trails so steep he became dizzy. "Yes, I lost my heart to it, right there and then. This is the place for a freedom loving anarchist. There will never be a road into this wilderness … "