“Whoa!” our cousin, 23-year-old Anthony, cried as he slouched toward the map of Big Sur I’d laid out on our kitchen table. “A PAPER map! Way to go old school!”

Was I really taking this kid on my rustic RV trip to Big Sur, expecting him to HELP me instill the love of nature in my 11 and 13 year olds? I mean, the kid has a Mohawk, and sometimes, he stripes it.

On the 12-hour drive from San Diego, Anthony “helped” by finding all 5 beach balls in the back of the RV, inflating them and then using the baseball bat to hit them all over the chassis’s interior. The kids howled with joy.  Hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, I grumbled and tried to keep my eyes glued to the asphalt’s crumbling edge.

Once at the gorgeous natural glory of our Big Sur campsite, Anthony walked through the Sequoias, past the banks of the sparkling Big Sur River to ask the nearest groundskeeper about any “cool clubs” nearby.

I threw the boogie boards from the roof of the RV with extra force.

For the first three days, we played in the Big Sur River and hiked. But by the fourth day with three more days to go, my clan was getting restless. Too bad, I growled, another Pfieffer hike was our destiny that day.

As I was finishing getting snacks ready, I spied Anthony through the tiny kitchen window, elbow on the sill of the campground’s check-in booth, chatting up the young, female gatekeeper. His Oakley sunglasses just edged up against the carefully folded bandana over his forehead which rimmed his loosely-placed Volcomm cap. By now, he’d had to wash out the Mohawk, and was completely ashamed of his curly locks in their typical, appealing disarray. Conventional hair shamed him.

“What?” I asked when he sauntered back. “Got yourself a date?”

“Her?” he asked with a wave of the thumb. “She’s too BIG SUR for me. Know?” Perhaps he objected to the Sherpa-inspired, woven wool cap she wore, tassels at her collar bones.  “She did tell me the best hike around, though.”

I started to dig in my heels, but suddenly bored of my own fascism, decided to give the kid a chance.

We started south down Highway 1, passing Pfeiffer State Park and the famous Detjens, two places SAFELY LISTED in my Camping in California book. Anthony’s hike off of a supposed “Salmon Creek,” didn’t appear anywhere in the pages of my trusty guide.

But we kept going.  At one point Anthony shouted for me to turn the RV around because he thought he’d spotted some Condors. Do we have to prolong this useless trek? I wondered.  More, turning an RV around on the windy (sp?) Highway 1 is no treat, particularly with loose kids in the back.  But the kids clamored to do what he said: Anthony is six feet of skate-shoed cool, after all.

Round about we went. At the next turn out, a crowd had gathered.  Crawling from the RV, we quickly spotted  eight Condors perched cliff-side. The other spectators were silent and nearly immobile as the red-headed adults and their grey feathered babies hopped and flapped on the craggy granite.  The male’s body was as long as my leg, its wing span, 10 feet. The babies were already the size of Thanksgiving turkeys, although more lithe.

We were almost to the guard rail when my daughter’s words broke the communal reverie. “They’re starving!” she cried. Gravel crunched as she spun to run back to the RV. “I’m gonna get them barbequed potato chips!”  I quickly barked, “NO!,” but  Anthony’s voice was louder. “Dude! Get those MARSHMELLOWS for them too!”

My fellow Condor-sentry onlookers and I simultaneously went berserk.

“Guess not, dude!” Anthony barked to my daughter who had frozen in her tracks.

Luckily, we got a good twenty minutes watching and photographing the condors before the Ventana Wildlife Society ranger came along with a turbo squirt gun to gently spray the condors from the cliff.

“They’re  losing their natural fear of humans,” the ranger explained to the crowd. “Kids want to feed them everything from their cabinets.” Struggling to deflect the burning gazes of the other tourists, I stiffened, turned and in a pinched voice quipped,

“Say! Let’s get back on the road, kids.”

On the route to this supposedly exceptional hike, Anthony had me braking at several points only to recant with:  “Here. Here! No. No! Go go! Why are you stopping?” We finally pulled over on the west side of Highway 1 by a small street sign on the opposite side of the road that said “Salmon Creek.”

As I’d suspected, the hike’s entrance promised the typical California coast deal that we’d already been on, two  hundred yards through chaparral down to the beach.

But then wait . . . about 100 yards into it, a bridge stretched over a gorge cradling a noisy stream a hundred feet below. Beyond that, a cool tunnel pierced the shrub-covered hillside. The kids were amazed at both, spitting into the stream and yelling in the tunnel in lame attempts to scare each other. We were still high up, not descending to the beach at all.

At the trail’s end, we found ourselves on top of a bald cliff face, looking 100 yards down into a cove . Clearly, the ocean had been working for eons to sweep out this near-circle from the sheer granite face, that or the powers that be had come down with one swipe of a giant, powers-that-be-style ice cream scoop to make this cove. At the base of the granite hollow, a beach studded with glistening black rocks accommodated mellow waves. No one but a kayaker or a Pelican could ever land there.

Big Sur Cove

Amazed as we were, I barked at the kids to sit at least ten feet back from the cliff’s edge. They promptly began a gradual fest of forward butt-scooting. In about thirty minutes, we all had feet dangling above the Pacific’s gentle waves.

Best of all, however, the water far below our feet held a sparkling ball of small fish–anchovy, a ranger told us later. The ball, at least ten feet in diameter and most likely holding thousands of fish, seemed to be a single entity as the fish turned, spread and balled up again in unison. Suddenly, a hole punctured the ball and through the middle came one silvery seal, followed by another, smaller one.

“MOM! MOM!” I heard that word a thousand times from two different directions as we sat on the cliff that afternoon for one and one half hours. Close behind, “DUDE! DUDE!” rattled almost as continuously. I was to look at how the mother seal flipped a fish to the baby, how the two mammals, sea-dogs, double-teamed the school, shattering them; how fish flanks caught the light and sparkled our eyes, even so far above.

“Sick, dude!” Anthony said. “Did you catch that?”

“Yeah, Dude. I caught it,” I replied, feeling a sudden rush of appreciation for a mind and bearing so different from mine. We’d never had been here if it hadn’t been for Anthony.

He grinned. “Whaddya think they’d do if I threw this water bottle in there?”

A flash of anger dissipated quickly enough.

“I don’t know what they’d do, but I’d strangle you!” I barked with enough harshness to cover the overwhelming tenderness I felt for him, my kids and the gorgeous Big Sur Coast.