Big Seal Deal

CAMBRIA, Calif. — When your romantic entanglement lives in Northern California, and you live in Southern California, you look for spots in between.

There are worse places than the central California coast.

We had reservations at the Cambria Pines Lodge, where we had stayed before. This time, the last weekend in January, we stayed in a cabin; a half-mile trail from the back of the lodge led down the hill to the village.

We also found some good food. Robin's, where we ate dinner, has an interesting mix of Asian, pasta and meat dishes. But my favorite restaurant was Linn's, where we ate lunch twice. I'm a fan of chicken pot pie, but I don't eat meat. Linn's has the perfect solution--tofu pot pie.

Once in Cambria, you can drive a few miles north and take a Hearst Castle tour, especially timely since today is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Maine, which led to the Spanish-American War. It was William Randolph Hearst who stoked the war, telling one of his photographers, "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war."

As fascinating as it is to walk through Hearst's home and imagine Cary Grant, Carole Lombard and Harpo Marx swimming in an indoor pool the size of a small lake, or to hear how Hearst imported the ceiling from a 17th century Italian church, the most riveting sight was the thousands of elephant seals lining the nearby beaches.

They are fat--adult males weigh 5,000 pounds and reach 12 to 16 feet long--and ugly, and you can spend hours watching them.

We had seen the seals in mid-October, sunning themselves on the coast north of San Simeon. When we returned three months later, I was humoring Sandi when she suggested we look for them again. I assumed they'd be gone. But as we walked closer to the short bluff overlooking the beach, I was stunned to see twice as many as had been there before. The place was as crowded as Santa Monica beach during a heat wave.

As we moved closer, we realized we had stumbled upon an elephant seal nursery. There was row after row of females, with just a few males on the outskirts. Nearly every female was nursing a pup. We didn't see any births, but other people there did. The pups looked like black Labrador retrievers, and they yelped like puppies when they wanted their mothers to roll over and give them a nipple. It's hard to believe something that cute could grow up to be so ugly.