Pescadero + Harley Farms

After leaving Santa Cruz on Saturday afternoon, we took our time driving back up the 1 to San Francisco.  To our left was the ocean, getting brighter and brighter as the sun lowered in the sky.  To the right, lots of little towns and roadside stands beckoned.

Our first stop was at Pie Ranch, a farm founded to give inner city kids a place to experience agriculture.  I had read about Pie Ranch in connection with Mission Pie, an amazing little pie shop in the Mission in San Francisco.  Mission Pie gets some of its produce from Pie Ranch and in return, Pie Ranch sells Mission Pie-made pies.  Their pies and baked goods looked delectable.

After chatting with the salesgirl and picking out some produce, we hit the road again.  The fact that we left Pie Ranch with a bunch of kale, a basket of strawberries, and three winter squash is a testament to our willpower.

{A shop in Pescadero}

Our next stop, a few miles up the road, was Pescadero, a little town in the hills off Highway 1.  We walked around the main street, which is tiny and boasts a disproportiate amount of antique stores and galleries. 

I spied what looked like an old cemetery way down at the end of this street, so we drove over to check it out.  On the way, however, Cole was distracted by a big wooden cutout of a little girl with a goat.  We'd heard that there was a goat farm in these parts, so we decided to follow the signs.  They led us to Harley Farms, a restored 1910 goat dairy that sells a variety of goat-derived products:  cheese, milk, lotion and soap, and even fudge!

The farm and all of its buildings were really beautiful.  We got a little tub of Pumpkin Fromage (kind of a soft goat cheese spread) as well as an apricot pistachio goat cheese button.  I would really love to go to one of their farm dinners someday--but at $150 a head, it's, uh, a bit hard to justify.

{View of the farm from the cheese shop}

Before leaving Pescadero, we stopped at the old cemetery I'd seen from the road.  It was started in the 1860s as a Catholic cemetery and most of the tombstones and gravemarkers looked ancient.  If the sun hadn't been almost down, I would have taken a lot of pictures of the crazily-tilting tombstones.  Here's one that Cole took out the window of a weather-worn wooden marker.

The sunset was totally beautiful that night as we drove home.  A perfect ending to our trip.