Day two was way more fun. We did a little early morning botanizing around our campsite in San Simeon, then jumped in the car again.

We drove just a little ways to Point Piedras Blancas and hung out at the beach with the seals for a few hours. This one was waving his flipper a lot. Possibly he was saying hello. More likely, he was waving off some bugs.

When we were done looking at the seals we drove a bit further north to the Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park and set up camp. Then we went on a hike.  The hike started in the redwoods. We were in a grove of fairly small trees, but I was still impressed with how huge they were.

This part of the forest was very wet.  There were all sorts of cool mosses and even a banana slug.  We hiked through the redwoods until we got to a waterfall and a steep turn in the trail.

At that point the vegetation became very different and it got a lot hotter.  The plants on this part of the trail were more likely to have strong scents when the leaves were crushed.  We all smelled of salvia and sage after this part of the trail, which was good because we hadn’t showered in a while.  We took a long break at the top and ate a lot of m&m’s.

After our break, we headed back and went down to Pfeiffer beach.  The road there was a bit scary, but no one died.  We climbed around on the rocks looking at rare dudlyea species, checked out some algae, and watched the sunset.