We’re back home.  It was a great trip, lots of fun, relaxing, nice to see family but also nice to be together on our own.

Some summary stats here:

Total miles:  3,301 (going direct in both directions would have been 2,500 miles)

Total gallons of gas:  168.08 ($562.72, average of $3.348/gal)

Miles per gallon:  19.642 (17 cents per mile)

Hotels:  Marriott (10 nights), Hilton Garden Inn (1), Comfort Inn (1), boutique hotels (5)

Tickets:  none

Hugs, kisses, shared laughs:  Too many to count  🙂

With apologies to Alton Brown, the last part of this trip has truly been ‘Good Eats’.  Portland is a mini- gluten-free capitol.  When you search for gluten-free restaurants you find many.  Since we don’t know the area well, it’s hard to know which are within walking distance.  So we asked Erik at the front desk of the Marriott.  He recommended Andina, a Peruvian restaurant in the Pearl District, within walking distance.  (He also called them and had them give us two servings of port and one dessert on the house!)  They are not totally gluten-free, but have a separate menu and appear to understand and implement gluten-free procedures very well.

We’d never had Peruvian food before; but we’ll definitely go back.  We had tapas, which are appetizers or snacks in Spanish cuisine.  We had six of these, which was probably one too many.  Plus two drinks each, plus dessert.  Everything was awesome, very flavorful and beautiful in presentation.

Earlier in the day we found a gluten-free bakery that was very good called New Cascadia.  We had coffee and cupcakes.

Overall we ate in six places that we highly recommend:

Poggio – in Sausalito, CA is an Italian trattoria below the Casa Madrona hotel. 

Robin’s Restaurant – in Cambria, CA is a little funky with great service, creative dishes and exceptional food.  It’s sort-of a hippy-ish place, very California.  They accommodate gluten-free, and vegan and organic, etc., very well.

John’s Grill – in San Francisco, CA is an old-time steak house mentioned in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.  They serve excellent steaks with fine service.

Avalon – in Eureka, CA is a modern restaurant in a historic building serving modern food with very friendly and accommodating service.  They are very knowledgeable about gluten-free including serving gluten-free crackers instead of bread.

Bella Union – in Jacksonville, OR is a saloon with a diverse menu of creative dishes and great service.

Andina – in Portland, OR was the culinary highlight of the trip.

We would go back to any of these, should we be in those areas again.  Six out of eighteen is not a bad average!

We knew we would stay in at least one or two Courtyard hotels.  They have a breakfast buffet where you make your own waffle.  But recently they have been remaking them and removing the buffets and the waffle makers.  Bummer…

Being two weeks into the trip, we needed to do some laundry.   Last night we stayed in a Comfort Inn.  We picked it part because the web site said they have a laundry room.  They do not.  But they have waffles!

Today we are at another Courtyard. On check-in, we asked for the location of the laundry room.  They told us it was out of order.  But… they have not received the latest Courtyard corporate makeover, so, they have waffles!

So for some reason, you can’t have laundry and waffles in the same place.  Who knows why…

Anyway, this is not something you see everyday:

And of course, when we got back from having dinner with our friends, we peeked at the laundry room and realized they have two machines, only one of which is out of order!

That aside, we had a fun day today.  We drove from Eureka, CA to Medford, OR.  That’s a little under two hundred miles many of which are tight and twisty running through the forest.  We would have expected slow overall speeds but we did the whole thing in four hours including a lunch stop.

As you come out of Eureka the geography and foliage change quite significantly.  You suddenly feel like you are in the Northwest.  You see many fewer deciduous trees and many more evergreens.  You start to see the north-south ravines we have in Washington.  And drive-up espresso stands are on (seemingly) every corner.

All told, we spent 15 days in California and covered about 2,200 miles in the state.  We’re over 2,800 so far.

We have two days to get from San Francisco to Medford, Oregon.  We came down I-5 at the start of the trip, so we wanted to go back some other way.  We decided on Eureka as the way-point so we could drive US 101 through the northern half of the state. 

For the first two hours, it looked like a bad decision.  We were in stop-and-go traffic for sixty miles.  At one point I shot this picture.  We were in a 65 mph zone!  And this was the fastest we’d gone for a while. 

Finally things began to move and we made better time.  We found an adorable town called Healdsburg in the heart of the Alexander Valley.  Being one of the bigger wine grape growing regions, the town is loaded with tasting rooms.

Beyond that the road is fantastic.  For the most part, wide, fast highways that run through redwood forests.  We saw trees that were six and eight feet in diameter right next to the road.  It was an awesome drive.

Eureka is a fun little town.  We had a great dinner at a restaurant called Avalon in Eureka’s Old Town.  Very  nice – good food, good service, nice people.  Then off to Starbucks for some coffee, reading and a six-star Sudoku puzzle.

We’ve covered over 2,600 miles with about 700 plus-or-minus to go.

When we were first married we lived in Berkeley.   Today we drove over the Bay Bridge and hung out there for a while.  We parked in our old neighborhood and walked around for a few hours.  Some of the stores we knew back then are still there.  The original Peet’s Coffee is just a block north of our old apartment.  It’s been there since 1966 and is going strong still.  We sat for a while and had coffee and a ‘Freddo’.  Chez Panise is gone, not sure when, but the site is a Thai restaurant now.  The Shattuck Co-op is gone too.  But many other stores are still there.

We used to eat at a place called Fat Albert’s.  It was/is a breakfast and lunch place.  Some where along the way, they changed the name to Fat Apple’s for political correctness.  But it’s still good!  We had lunch there and beat the traffic back to SF.

Our first apartment:

That’s our (former) balcony.  When we moved in, the sofa we had was too long to go in the elevator or make the bend in the stairs.  So the driver of the van propped it up on his shoulders, I grabbed on from the balcony and he raced up the stairs and we pulled it over together.  It was easier to move out!

Today we left the California coast near San Simeon and headed for downtown San Francisco.  It’s about a 220 mile drive.  We expected the first part to be slow, but the drive along the cliffs facing the Pacific  is incredible.  We were surprised by how many parts of the drive are one-lane only.  You wait at traffic lights for up to five minutes at a time while they switch lanes.  The bigger problem is the people who plod along with twenty or so cars stacked behind them.  California actually has a law (C.V.C. 21656, which is posted frequently by the roadside) that covers this.  It says, if you’re holding up five or more cars you MUST pull over at the next turnout.  Some did, and we waved our thanks as we went by.  Most don’t, they just plod on five miles or more below the speed limit.  After quite a few hours, we reached Carmel by the Sea and had lunch and did some window shopping.

The rest of the drive should have been easy, but California traffic is broken.  The last 42 miles took us two hours, bumper-to-bumper and stop-and-go the whole way.

In many ways this was the perfect year to take this trip.  The weather has been great.  Gas prices are sort-of low.  And hotels are so un-crowded we are getting great rates at really nice places.  But at the same time, driving in California is becoming completely impractical.

Today was the first real touristy thing we did on this trip.  We visited the Hearst Castle in San Simeon.  This is the outdoor pool:

He also had an amazing indoor pool.

Having seen Ludwig’s castles in Bavaria (Day 17 — Part Zwei) it was interesting to compare one of the very few American castles.  Of course it turns out that William Randolph Hearst had European castle envy and imported a huge amount of the materials and fixtures of San Simeon from France, Spain and other parts of the world.

Maybe the most interesting thing, to me at least, was the ketchup on the dinning room table.   The castle was Hearst’s summer home and a working ranch.  So while it was filled with amazing antiques and artifacts from around the world, they ate like it was a summer home with paper napkins, ‘regular’ china and condiments on the table.  The other item that stood out was one bathroom per bed in the house.  Each bedroom had a private bathroom.  The bedrooms with two beds had two bathrooms!

I can now say I’ve been in a bigger house than the Gates shack in our neck of the woods.

We’re in Cambria, CA, a little village on Hwy 1 just south of San Simeon.  We found a great hotel called the El Colibri.  It’s just fantastic, very modern, clean but small and very friendly.  They recommended we eat at Robin’s and we had a great dinner.  They claim to be ‘Hand crafted world food’ and have Indian, Thai, Mexican and American entries.  We both loved our meals.

We went over the 2,000 mile mark today.  The car is filthy!

Back to the road! We did five days of driving every day, then five days in one place.  Now we have seven or so days to get back home.  We’re doing some sightseeing, starting today with Santa Barbara.   We’ve been through, but never stopped.  We found a small (17 rooms) hotel near the beach for a great price.  (hotels.com is awesome.)  State Street is sort-of the main drag downtown and we walked about a half-mile or more of it, and back again of course.  Got dinner, coffee, ice cream and then back to the hotel.  The beach looks pretty nice, but we stuck to the sidewalks.  State Street turns out to have mostly stores we see everywhere plus a few unique surf-related shops.  We ate at a nice Italian restaurant and sat outdoors.  A guitar player sitting on a nearby bench provided pleasant background music.  We tipped him afterward.

The hotel is pretty nice, but no AC so we’re running the ceiling fan at full speed.  They left a great gift basket for us and the room has a full kitchen.  So far we’ve spent seven nights in chain hotels and four nights in boutique hotels. 

No major miles these four days, just family time.  Friday we spend with two sisters and their families.  That night our son and his girlfriend flew in.  Saturday we all went to In-n-Out Burger in Carlsbad and took over two outdoor tables.   It was cold (for CA) and gray, but it was fun anyway.  That night we had the party for Poppy.  He was surprised and we all enjoyed ourselves.

On Sunday we had a brunch for our son for his 25th birthday.  Sixteen people at the Beach House in Cardiff by the Sea.  We brought cupcakes from Cupcake Love for dessert.  Monday was more family time including a city-wide black out in the evening.  Our hotel had power via a generator so the nephew and I went there and zapped pizza roles in the microwave before they went bad in the freezer.

Overall we’ve been having a great time, but eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and not getting any real exercise.  Tomorrow we start the drive back to Seattle.  We’ll take at least two more days going back than we took coming down.

It’s been a great trip so far!

Our goal was Solana Beach.  The purpose of the trip, beside having some together-time and seeing the West Coast, was to get to Solana Beach, CA for Poppy’s surprise 80th birthday party and Andrew’s 25th (not surprise) birthday party.  We made it through LA quicker than we thought, mainly because the carpool lane moved pretty well.  We stopped to see friends in Lake Forest and got into Solana Beach around 10pm. 

Driving from Seattle to (near) San Diego was a lot easier than we thought.  The total distance was 1,482 miles including our various meanderings for lunch, dinner and gasoline.  If you stayed on I-5 the whole way, it would be 1,250 miles.  So going to Sausalito, Los Gatos and San Luis Obispo added about 200 miles.

The car is great, although very noisy.  While small, it holds all of our stuff and the whole interior is devoted to just two people, so you don’t feel cramped.  The iPod interface is pretty infuriating, but once you get music going, it’s nice to have.

Changing hotels every night has not been a hassle.  We quickly got into a rhythm that worked for us.  Now it’s five days in one place; will be interesting.  We’ll be with family the whole time, which will be fun.

A panorama of the Madonna Inn with our car out front.  The car is parked in front of our room, on the right.