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.

We drove 202 miles today between Los Gatos and Sa Luis Obispo.  Easy day.  We got here in the middle of the afternoon and had time to relax, do some shopping (some birthdays coming up) and have a nice dinner at a Thai restaurant. 

San Luis Obispo is a nice town, or maybe we should say, has a nice downtown.  Plenty of parking, lots of storefronts, restaurants, etc.  We found a store that sells candy from past generations including Moon Pies, candy cigarettes and those little candy dots stuck to paper.

The hotel tonight is The Madonna Inn.  Our room is rather cave like, literally.  Rock walls including in the shower.  Every room is unique.  The overall color scheme of the hotel is pink.  They went wild with it.

Tomorrow is a long day.  Not so many miles, but we head through LA so it will take a long time.

Here is a photo of the Madonna Inn.

 

That’s all for this post!

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In a 911… One of us had a blast.  The other was sweet enough to not complain.  The road is significantly curvier than it looks in the map above.  It’s the kind of road the car was made for.  And the car did great!

We started the day in Sausalito.  It was cold and gray.  We stopped at the Golden Gate Bridge to look for our brick.

I bought this nearly twenty years ago as a surprise for our tenth anniversary.  When we went looking for it back then, I had the location on a sheet of paper.  This time we forgot to take that with us.  It took us the better part of an hour to spot the brick this time.  And we knew what section it was in!  But we did find it, it was nice to see; nicer to realize it is twenty years old (nearly) and we’re still going strong.

From there we drove US 1 along the coast to Half Moon Bay.  It was still cold and foggy.  Not long after we got on 35 (the twisty road in the map), the sun came out and things warmed up.

About halfway we stopped at Alice’s Restaurant.  A friend had suggested we stop there, but we forgot all about it.  When the sign for Woodside came up I suddenly remembered the restaurant, and there it was!  The food was good; we had burgers.  It was nice to sit outside and take our time eating.  It was our first non-grocery store lunch in a few days. 

Overall, today was meant to be a slow day.  We only covered 78 miles and had more time to relax and walk around Los Gatos.

Tomorrow we start pushing for SoCal again.

As you get closer to the Bay Area, the geography becomes more varied, the temperature drops (94 to 61), the roads get more crowded and things get more dense.  We Hit Sausalito in the mid-afternoon.  We’ve been here many times before, but never stayed in town.  Back in the day you struggled to find a parking spot in town; but today there were plenty.  Probably a result of the overall economy.  We wandered around and had a nice dinner at a restaurant downstairs from the hotel.

We drove less today than the previous two days and will drive very little tomorrow.  We have plenty of time to get down to SoCal, so we’ll spend a little more time in the Bay Area where this is some much to see and do.

Driving on the day after July 4th, we saw more cars than on previous days.  I’m not sure why Winnebago’s think they can handle the left lane… We saw a pickup truck pulling a mobile home pulling a trailer, in the left lane in a 70 MPH zone, going up hill.  Over thirty MPH below the speed limit.  Oy…

We drove this same car in Germany and saw the pecking order of cars on the Autobahn.  The big BMW and Mercedes sedans are the kings of the road, except for the un-restricted cars (Porsches, Ferraris, etc.)  In California, you can pretty much bet the left-lane bandit will be a 2004 Ford Windstar mini-van hauling along at 95 MPH, with bald tires.

But, we have been sticking to the major Interstate (I-5) to get about halfway in the first three days.  As we slow down, we’ll hit more interesting roads.

We did the last 195 miles of Oregon today and another 130 into California.  We landed in Redding.  It looks a lot like Boise.  Same geography, same regional stores, etc.  In just one-half day of driving in CA, we saw more speed traps and/or moving police cars than we saw in WA and OR combined.  But the radar detector helps as does staying in the pack.  That’s not to say it isn’t fun to catch up to the pack up ahead.  🙂

Not much going on in Redding on a Sunday that also happens to be the 4th of July.  But their Starbucks is open until 10pm.

We did enjoy seeing Mt. Shasta from the road.  It ain’t no Rainier, but it’s still very neat.  We were surprised by how little snow it has on it, considering it’s approximately the same height as Mt. Rainier, which is snow-covered year-long.  It looks fairly snow-covered in this photo, but as you get closer, you realize how bare it is.  No trees either, I assume that’s because it is taller than the tree line.

Before hitting California, we drove through Ashland, OR.  It’s the host of a very popular summer Shakespeare Festival.  And very crowded on July 4th.  We had planned to stop for lunch, but quickly realized we would never find a place to park.  But we might go back on the return trip. 

In the end we bought cold-cuts and oranges at a grocery store in Yreka, CA.  Not sure how to pronounce that…

So far, fun trip!

We drove from Long Island to Boston a few weeks back.  That’s about 250 miles and it took us around five hours including a long-ish lunch break at Rein’s Deli just outside of Hartford.  Yesterday we left our home in Washington and made it halfway through Oregon.  It took about seven hours including long-ish lunch break at Burgerville in Centralia and a Starbucks break in, um, somewhere in Oregon.  The thirty miles on I-5 north of Eugene is the straightest road I can remember traveling in a long while.  But the car is so noisy, you don’t get lulled to sleep by it.

If you spend most of your time on the east coast, you miss how big this country really is.  And how much space there is between cities.  And we’re in Oregon which is nothing like Montana or Wyoming.

We’re getting just about twenty miles to the gallon, a little more than I expected.  But still, the 322 miles we drove ate a full tank of gas.  At least it’s one-third the price the last time we took this car on a road trip.  (That was Germany…)

Today is more driving and maybe meeting up with a friend in Medford.  We’re trying to get upwards of half the miles done in the first two days and then slow down when we get near the Bay Area.

Day 1

Start	End
Woodinville, WA 1:40pm	Springfield, OR 8:00pm

Day two, off we go!