We arose early our final morning after staying overnight at the Salinas Best Western (complete with foam coffee cups, plastic stirring sticks and authentic Best Western conditioning shampoo in the convenient half-ounce bottle).

We were due for a 12:33 p.m. flight on Alaska out of San Jose. We had a couple hours to kill, so rather than take a straight shot on the freeway to Silicon Valley, we detoured through the croplands on Highway 183, through Castroville and out to the bay past Santa Cruz

And we're glad we did, because otherwise we'd have never seen the Giant Artichoke, outside the Giant Artichoke Restaurant in Castroville. (We had to veer off the highway and take a photo.)

SALINAS -- I got to touch Rocinante. I am dopily, nerdishly and deeply thrilled.

SAN SIMEON -- Hearst Castle is a pretty amazing place to see -- no matter when you see it.

But our visit last night at sunset, when dapper men in dinner jackets waved their cigars at us and women in evening gowns and plumed hats laughed at their jokes and waited for another martini before singing along with a piano ditty, really kind of put us in the mood for the place. Just as if it were, say, 1931.

The road south. Weather: Brilliant sun, punctuated by fog every 5 miles or so. Driving music: Sound track from "Across the Universe" (Beatles tunes). Road trip!

We found two places we loved for breakfast, which is the only meal we could (almost) afford to eat out at Big Sur, where everything costs more than in the rest of the physical world, because -- well, because it's in California, and it's several miles down a winding road from anywhere, and simply because it's the ethereal world of Big Sur.

And it made me think of Tom Deasy, a local guy we had lunch with back up the coast in Capitola, near Santa Cruz.

Just when I thought a horseback ride through Big Sur country was going to bolster my image as a manly man, I narrowly avoided being known as "Gigi" all afternoon.

We headed south to Big Sur today, our first day of rain after three days of lovely sunshine. But the scenery didn't shrink.

Here are a few favorite photos from the drive:

The Ansel Adams photos in the Weston Gallery in Carmel were the only photos on the wall that didn't have prices.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream." -- Opening sentence to "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck

MONTEREY -- The good news: My daughter finished reading "Cannery Row" today, and fell in love with Steinbeck. The bad news: We visited Cannery Row today, and it wasn't anything approaching a poem. A grating noise, maybe. Perhaps a stink.

With good-humored loathing, we cursed it in the name of John Steinbeck and anybody who respects the memory of the iconoclastic old coot.

Santa Cruz is an interesting old hippie town -- meaning both that it's an old town, dating back to the founding of a mission here in 1791, and that it's full of interesting old hippies.

Santa Cruz is where surfing came to the mainland United States in the 1880s, when some Hawaiians attending a local missionary school brought their surfboards. But it can't call itself Surf City USA, because Huntington Beach, in Southern California, home to the world surfing championships, has trademarked that name and is filing lawsuits right and left over it, even forcing a Santa Cruz T-shirt shop to stop using the slogan.

So we were told at the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum when we dropped by. Who knew hanging 10 was so cutthroat and political?

Monday dawned without a cloud, as March ended lamblike in Santa Cruz. The perfect day for a ride on the town's best bike path, along West Cliff Drive.

Where else on the California coast can you stay in quaint, historic cottages two blocks from the beach, with a charming young French woman as your hostess, have the run of a kitchen stocked with baskets of sweet oranges, rolls, bagels and other food free for the taking, and pay less per night than it probably costs you to fill your gas tank?