After our last night camping at Big Sur we packed up the soggy tent and the rest of our stuff before heading north, back towards Monterey.

From Monterey we headed East towards Salinas and the agricultural central valley of California. On the way we stopped off at Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca, a famous racetrack which I have driven in a number of computer games, and sadly still haven't driven in real life. It was fun to see the track in the flesh and we drove around the perimeter and took some photos before carrying on our way.

Our drive east through the central valley was nowhere near as dramatic as our journey over the last few days, but the scenery was still interesting, with hilly grazing land and huge flat areas set to orchards all surrounded in the distance by steeper, higher hills. This is the country where John Steinbeck lived and a lot of his books were set and it was interesting to see the places I had imagined from the books of his that I'd read in the flesh.

Eventually we reached the town of Merced where we planned to stay before heading to Yosemite, a couple of hours drive to the east. We found a cheap motel and relaxed for the evening, trying to catch up on our photo organising and blogging, before catching up on our sleep.

However, in the morning we were still tired and felt like we could do with a full day off so we booked another night in the motel and had a lazy day, only heading out for a big lunch at the 'BBQ Pit' where we had pretty much every kind of meat barbecued with beans, mashed potatoes and veggies then retreated to the motel room to the monumental bed to watch crazy ad-laden American TV for the evening.