We spent a lovely week exploring the central California coast, heading up to Paso Robles from Long Beach, once again realizing how long it takes to get out of LA. Ugh, But traffic wasn’t too terrible – it took us about 4 hours to get there. Since we took Maggie we stayed at a dog friendly La Quinta which was located a little bit out of town but right off of Highway 46. it’s a nice place – my only gripe was that our room was on the third floor which was kind of a pain with the dog.
One of our intentions for our Paso stay was to look at housing – was Paso a possible place where we might like to live? The La Quinta turned out to be a great location as it was within easy waking distance of several nice neighborhoods. We did a lot of exploring and talked with a realtor and after three days came to the conclusion that it wasn’t for us. It’s awfully hot up there and the cost of housing was pretty similar to Long Beach as lots of people from both LA and the Bay Area are moving there, driving up costs. It’s pretty far from a big airport and just didn’t feel like us. The high cost of housing is no joke here – there really aren’t (m)any affordable places left here. A fixer upper in Paso is $750K and at this point in our lives we’d rather not have to spend a lot of time and money fixing another house up, especially when it’s in an area that we just aren’t that into. So our search continues but I am beginning to feel that our future doesn’t lie in California.
We did take a little time to have some fun and went to a new winery called Dracaena. The winery is named for a plant and their first Weimaraner who was called Draco (he’s also featured on the labels). Needless to say it’s a very dog friendly place and Maggie had a great time, as did we. We also went to our favorite Paso winery, Eberle, another very dog friendly place where they offer amazing discounts for vets. On our way out of town we stopped at one of Chuck’s favorite breakfast places, the Cowgirl Cafe.
We continued up the coast to Monterey and really enjoyed the cooler weather (Paso was in the upper 90s for the whole time we were there). We stayed two nights at the Monterey Beach Hotel and can’t recommend it highly enough. It wasn’t cheap but boy, was it nice! We had an ocean view room that opened onto the outdoor patio areas and had amazing views of the ocean. Each evening they offer s’mores kits for the fire pits on the patio areas. They had a lovely pool and hot tub as well as dry saunas and cold plunges. We took advantage of pretty much everything and also enjoyed exploring downtown Monterey (it’s been ages since I’d been to Cannery Row). We found a nice breakfast place in town called Rosine’s, and also ate at the hotel restaurant and bar (the bar was great because you can order food and have it delivered to the room which we did and then watched the spectacular sunset with Maggie while we ate).
After Monterey we started heading home, breaking the drive into easy chunks. We spent one night in Cambria at the Cambria Shores Inn. It was basically a motel but was updated with nice finishes and a a very dog friendly vibe. Given that pretty much every room there seemed to have a dog in it, I’d say there aren’t a ton of dog friendly places to stay in Cambria. We enjoyed lovely walks along the Fiscalini Ranch trail and the Bluff Trail. The most amazing thing was that it rained! We were very surprised – hadn’t seen rain in a while in California! And the temps were on the cool side, too.
Our final stop was in Goleta – where we stayed mostly so we’d have a short(er) drive home on Saturday morning as Chuck was starting a woodworking class and it was the first session. We stay at the Residence Inn – a nice place but really overpriced (it was Friday night, always the most expensive and they had a $150 non-refundable pet fee which felt like highway robbery but it would have cost us even MORE to stay in Santa Barbara). We left early Saturday morning and made excellent time home for Chuck to make his class with time to spare.
It was a lovely week and very educational. The California coastline is absolutely breathtaking and the views never get old. But boy, are things getting crazy expensive! Our hybrid Crosstrek did well, averaging about 45 miles per gallon. The cost of gas was crazy, hitting about $6/gallon in Monterey and about $5.50 elsewhere. I think the cheapest we found was $5.39. We were glad the car only needed to get filled up once!