chilled life except for breeding time when the males go head to head with each other in fierce battles often resulting in death for one of them! They really are huge beasts that you really wouldn't want to mess with!

After taking a multitude of photos we headed off and started on the last part of our journey down the coast, we still had a fair way to go and time was ticking by. It had been a very long drive and we were concerned that we would be doing the same drive the way with Cath and co the day after they arrived in LA and were starting to wonder whether it would be too long of a journey. Our choices were that we phoned the Big Sur campground and ask if we could move the booking back by a day thus saving them from an 8-9 hour car ride.

We finally reached Cachuma lake around 6pm.

A ranger told us that the campsite was nearly full and we needed to go and get in the queue to see if there were anymore spaces available! We both looked at each other as we knew that there weren't any other campsites in the area. Keeping everything crossed we waited till it was our turn in the queue. We asked the ranger for a tent site for one small tent and he replied by 'it's your lucky day' they had 3 campsites left! We couldn't believe it we got the 3rd to last campsite out of 540 - how lucky is that? With that we paid our money then went off in search of our site. The ranger had said that as it was the 3rd to last one it didn't provide any shade but we were pleasantly surprised to find a tree on our site which would provide adequate shade from the mornings sun and it was about 3 pitches back from the lake - just perfect! Seeing as we were so lucky with the tent site and after a very very long drive we decided to head to the shop and grab a pack of beers! We had a very pleasant evening chilling