Walking 25 miles to the middle of nowhere

I wake up in Cambria and I know that I have some serious hiking to do.  The two hostel employees Chris and Krista have asked from the day off from their hostel duties, so that they may join me on my hike.  I am excited to have some travel companions and we get off to a start around 9 am.  We are out the door after a quick breakfast of toast, and I down a large glass of skim milk with chocolate hemp fiber powder...yuck!  We head out of the hostel and down the main road to Moonstone Beach Road and start walking the bluff side, where the views are quite beautiful and unobstructed by anything really.  After a few miles of walking on the bluff, the path seems to end and we wander for a while through the small town of San Simeon Acres.  We walk through town and go over a barbed wire fence to reach a gate we would have reached, had we taken the dead end road running parallel to the highway.  I manage over the fence without ripping my pants or clothing, but I put a small tear in the mesh of my right sneaker, leaving an area where my toe may push through.  I must remember to patch that!  We hike over more bluffs around the W.R. Hearst Pier and then we descend onto the beach for 100 feet as we pass some elephant seals (which look dead but are not apparently since they open their eyes and start guzzling water when I try to pass).  The three of us are freaked out, so we scurry up the hill and duck under a barbed wire fence to "private" property which is quite obviously used a lot.  We walk through miles of heavily forested woods, just 50 feet from the bluffs edge, but keeping the bulk of the daylight out, until we emerge in a barbed wire fenced in area...where we encounter sand dunes and a bull.  We hike three miles to the highway, and get through a bent area of barbed wire.  Luckily, we do this just minutes before two female rangers get out of plain vehicles and try to educate us and keep us from going near the seals...they have no idea we were just there.  YIKES.  At about 5 pm we reach the elephant seal colony and watch the seals for 40 minutes before leaving that area right after sunset and walking the side of highway 1 for two hours hoping that Anne's husband Paolo (who is coming from Monterey) will see us and give us a ride. She has called him and told him to look out for us.  He should be there at 6:45 pm, but at 7:34 pm we begin to worry. At that point we can't get any cellphone service so we can't call. We catch the attention of a vacationing German couple and they give us a ride to our hostel in Cambria (25 miles away).  We are thankful.  When we arrive at the hostel, we learn that Paolo had a car accident just a few miles north of where we were, and that is why he couldn't come pick us up. We eat dinner and listen to Paolo's story.  I find that the older gentleman I met at the San Luis Obispo hostel is here and that he is my roommate.  I am tired and we have had a long day, so I head to bed and sleep well.

We walk for hours in the complete dark...the stars are incredible, but we can't see anything