Ian Rambles
The Pacific Coast Highway runs along the steep California coastline. There are very few places where it is connected across the coastal mountain range to the central lowlands.

We watched the smoke from a forest fire ahead of us for miles - then stoppped to try to take pictures of a helicopter filling a huge water bag from the sea. This was our downfall. A few miles further on we were one of the first few cars stopped by the Forestry fire service as they closed the road. if we hadn'y stoppped to take photos..... ( and they weren't good enough to use anyway! )

Fiona's Journal
Today we have been in the car for 10 hours , driven 300 miles and then ended up a meagre 100 miles closer to San Francisco. The boys are particularly aggrieved because they wanted to stay another night at the rather nice motel and not go anywhere today and we, the tyrannical parents, over rode them. We did let them have a leisurely swim and watch a bit of TV and use the internet so we didn't leave until midday.
The first bit of the journey was just tedious – stop start on the Interstate in heavy weekend traffic.

The boys said “We told you so – we should have stayed another day.”

Then we cut back West across the coastal mountain range onto Pacific Highway One, and enjoyed some really spectacular driving as the road wound up and down the side of the mountain range. There were great swooping bends, and slaloms, and very tight hairpins, and summits where you could not be sure that there was any more road until you had committed yourself to going over the top. It was all made doubly exciting by vertical drops of many hundreds of feet, to the rocky shoreline beneath, on our left and the vertical rock face, much of it netted to catch falling rocks, on our right. You could see Ian just loving it!

We had done three quarters of this section of road when we started to see a huge plume of yellowish smoke rising up from amongst the forested mountains ahead. As we got nearer we stopped to watch a helicopter scooping huge bags full of water out of the sea and then soaring up the mountainside to drop the water onto the forest fire. As we got nearer still a string of fire appliances passed us on the road (oddly they are a subtle shade of greyish green – I would have thought camouflage was a disadvantage in their job). Very shortly after this we were stopped by a member of the fire crew and told we would have to turn back. It was more than 60 slow and twisty miles back to the nearest point at which we could cross the mountains onto the alternative route North, Highway 101.

The boys said “We told you so – we should have ....”

And so we retraced our steps for two and a half hours. This did have one considerable plus point from my point of view. I got to drive all the really fun bits of road that Ian had driven in the other direction! We went right back to St. Louis Obispo, meaning that about 150 miles of our day's driving had been self-canceling, and it was gone 9.00 before we found a motel with any vacancies and then we all had to share one very expensive room and two beds.

The boys said “Never mind, that wasn't exactly your fault, but really we should have stayed another night at that nice motel in Thousand Oaks!”

Arthur's Log:
Grrr everyones being contradictory today.

I say “lets stay one more night to avoid the Sunday morning traffic” they say naa, 30 seconds later, stuck in traffic.

Then when a forest fire cuts our route short I say “lets go back 60miles to the last exit and find somewhere to stay” they say no lets go back 30miles and fill up on stuff at the shop and then wait 3-6 hours for it to CLEAR! (the only reason we didn't end up waiting for hours in the car was because the shop had closed)

George's Musings
It was very annoying about the fire.