Perusing more pix from our flight home along Big Sur from San Jose I picked out three more to share. First up is the Nepenthe hood. When we stop in there on our drives along this scenic coast, it seems to be just a few rustic commercial buildings and I’ve wondered how far people drive to their jobs in the shops and eateries there. Well, some might actually walk judging by this pic.
7174 Nepenthe Hood
This neighborhood includes an extended area with lots of homes you just don’t see from the road. Every ridge line is dotted with them, and more are probably nestled in the treed valleys too. Nepenthe itself is on the small peak just left of the straight stretch of road visible in the upper middle of the pic. Maybe there’s a trail down the steep creek bed that opens onto the beach. At the upper right of the green meadow above the beach you can make out the area of this next pic. Looks to me like some sort of open air retreat center, but maybe it’s just a really cool ranch house.
7177 Retreat Ranch?
We’ve had many contacts with people involved in the Esalen community for decades, but only driven in part way one time. So it was difficult to spot from the air until I looked it up on a gMaps satellite view. This pic makes me want to go and explore it more. Maybe even make a workshop proposal and spend some time there.
7215 Esalen
As with Nepenthe, there’s a relatively big hidden community around it, including across the creek outlet at the bottom-left of the pic. I’ve yet to discover an airport on the Big Sur coast, but it wouldn’t help much anyway given that the weather there is so often unsuited to our kind of flying. We’ve flown to Monterey and taken the inexpensive bus, but it turns around before Esalen. We could also fly to SLO or Paso and rent a car, but that only shaves 1.5 hours off the drive time from home and so far we haven’t done it. Looking at these pix sure has me thinking about it again tho.
John & Anne Wiley 
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