California Adventures: San Francisco to Big Sur

We were fortunate enough to be able to take a few weeks off and spend them traveling around California. We hit San Francisco, Big Sur, Santa Barbara, Joshua Tree National Park, Death Valley National Park, Pinnacles National Park and Santa Cruz. We took a pretty insane amount of photographs, so we decided to break up our adventures into a few different sections to be able to share as much of our wandering as we could.

Here you’ll find everything from our wanderings around San Francisco to Big Sur.

Some of our favorite highlights from our trip:

We both tend to lose it over seeing animals in their natural habitat. We saw about a billion elephant seals, a bobcat, a California Condor, coyotes, and Dana saw a whale during this portion of our trip. There was a lot of yelling and excitement about all of those. Dana pretty much turned into the human version of the party horn emoji.

We visited Alcatraz, a place Dana has been dying to visit since she was a kid.

Dana took a ton of photos of tourists using her wedding photographer skills.

We both got some pretty epic poison oak while we were camping in Big Sur. We managed to get to a RediMed and get some steroids which made camping while covered almost entirely in poison a little more bearable. As I’m typing this I’m still recovering from it. DO NOT MESS WITH POISON OAK MY FRIENDS.  While that was a pretty awful experience we now are both pros at identifying it so we’ll be prepared next time we head back to Cali.

We consumed a practically insane amount of coffee and hot chocolate.

We had a ridiculous amount of time to READ. Something we don’t always have time for in our busy schedules here at home. We both finished two books throughout our travels.

A taxi crashed into our rental car, super fun times. Good things do often come from the bad though – we managed to get upgraded to a Jeep so we looked pretty cool rolling around California in it.

We decided the best thing in the world are those Kettle BBQ chips. When you’re camping for a few days in a row they tend to quench that craving for meat that you can’t quite get from camp food.

That being said here are some of our favorite shots from San Francisco – Big Sur!