Day 7 has been an interesting day! While the flights for this trip are booked they are subject to change at any time. Other than that and some key events nothing is planned; more of a ‘let the winds decide’ type of trip. That’s exactly what happened today. I was supposed to jump out of a plane at 18,000′ today.
The overcast weather in the morning kept that from happening. Instead we grabbed a bite to eat and asked out waitress (BTW, her grandmother had cancer) what we should do with our ‘open’ day. She told us to check out ’17 Mile Drive’. Wow am I glad that we did! Aside from walking onto the famed Pebble Beach, we saw some amazing views of the coast. We then headed south towards Big Sur. It’s there that things changed again. We had planned on hiking in Big Sur for part of the afternoon and then pressing south to Santa Barbara.
What happened instead is that we met Wally, a prostate cancer survivor. Wally works at Coast Ridge Outfitters, where we stopped to get a trail map. What ensued was a 30 minute conversation. Wally & his wife Nola hitchhiked to the Big Sur area over 30 years ago. Wally is from Ohio and Nola is from Southern California. When they got to Big Sur they fell in love w/ the area and decided that they would end up there 1 day. So they headed back south a little ways, worked hard, raised their family, and now reside in Big Sur full time. Wally and Nola were AWESOME people and Wally and I got into a good conversation about cancer and the connection we share because of it.
The fact is that cancer does not discriminate. It doesn’t care if you’re white, black, rich, poor, skinny, overweight, educated, uneducated, or any other adjective. If affects everyone from every walk of life. Talk about something that’s a ‘uniter’. I really can’t thing of something else that can bring as many people together, even though it’s because of something negative. Wally and I discussed taking those negative connections and turning them into positive ones. It was then that Wally told us about a bunch of hikes that we need to do. Hikes that would require more time than we had today. So, with that, Jackie from Skydive Monterey said we could try to jump again tomorrow morning and we’ll be hiking on Wally’s ‘hidden’ trail tomorrow!
Thanks again for everyone’s support! I’m fortunate to have a good friend with me for this leg of the trip. There has been another change of plans and on Thursday I’m heading to Salt Lake City for the day to meet some people that I’ve traded e-mailed with over the past 2 weeks. If you know of some sites that I just HAVE to see while in Salt Lake please let me know! I’ll probably have a rental car for a few hours to check some things out!