| It is only 16 miles from the Huntington to the coast, but it took
us over two hours to fight our way through the LA traffic. This brought us
to Malibu Beach where we spent several days wandering. |  |
 | The rocks just off the
beach are haunts for a number of seabirds but it was clear that the king of
the castle here was the brown pelican. We had seen these further up the coast
in Washington state, and
they still look like pterodactyls in flight. The shoreline is the
province of the waders, some stalking majestically along the water's edge
before sticking their long beaks into the water-softened sand and vibrating
madly to catch the tiny creatures they find. |
| We spent some time watching the dolphins playing just off the
shore, although
the camera really struggled to catch them. Digital cameras have a built-in
delay so catching the dolphins above water was more luck than skill. |  |
 | Malibu Beach has a
seafront community of the rich and famous, although the really rich and
famous live in the canyons running inland, away from the water's edge but
probably with more spectacular views of the ocean. You can never quite see
these. These sea-front homes are really close to the water's edge, so we
wonder why they don't wash away. |
 | The houses come in a
variety of styles and are also very
close together. Their access road runs along the back at the level of the
highest storey, and most
are three stories high. The condition of some can only be described as
dilapidated. Most are built of wood and supported above the sand on wooden pilings. The beach is free
access below the high water mark, but above belongs to the houses. Lots of 'No
Trespassing' and 'Armed Guards attend' notices. Walking along the road we
spotted this slightly more colourful example. Can you imagine being allowed
to do this in Dore or Whirlow? |
| Our campsite was fairly empty and this was our view. We are only
about 100ft from the sea, but the Pacific Coast Highway runs along the
bottom of the cliff we are on. It was, however, surprisingly quiet. |  |
 | Above us were more
sites, mainly for tent campers. This site is already booked full for the summer of
2006, but at this time of year we were fine. |
| And the sun sets quite early and it gets dark very quickly afterwards. You really need clouds for spectacular sunsets and we just had
cloudless skies - not that we were complaining. |  |
November 1st - 2nd - Californian RV Resort - Palmdale CA
 | This was a short
page so I've added a few shots from a few days later as we headed inland to
Lancaster to look at the new RV we had seen at the Pomona show. Here we got
a few clouds high up and hence got the spectacular sunsets. |
| Red sky at night is a shepherds delight at home, but here it usually
prefaces incoming weather, so may not be so. |  |
 | This is a fairly
good shot taken from an RV doing 50mph on the bumpy freeway. The lights are
those from Palmdale, an inland community about 40 miles from LA. |
| The other side of the road looks like this with the LA Aqueduct
and a small lake. The San Andreas fault runs right through the middle of the
picture with the aqueduct, lakes, freeways, houses etc. An accident waiting
to happen... |  |
|