Today's 12.5 mi followed more of the Juan Bautista de Anza Trail paralleling the Santa Lucia mountains, which by now are more properly "hills." A huge breakfast, a short walk, a half of a backpack (the other half staid at the motel), and a praline malt at Orcutt's Doc Burnstein's Ice Cream Lab made for a hugely successful day. I am ready to bus down to Orcutt in the morning and walk the 22+ miles to my 13th mission, La Purissima.
Old town Orcutt was the highlight of the day, starting with the faux water tower to house cell-phone antennas--mighty clever, as they said in the old days (check out the pic). The town is trying to project that 1904 flavor when it was established. It was named after the Union Oil Company "dean of petroleum geologist" William Warren Orcutt who BTW discovered fossils in the La Brea Tar Pits! The town was founded as a boom town riding the success of the oil production going on in the early 1900s. Orcutt was assigned to survey the area; his findings urged Union Oil to be aggressive which in turn led to huge successes.
