You owe it to yourself to take a week driving up the 1. Lompoc rules, but Cambria is nicer. As is Morro Bay. I adore Pismo. Monterey? Shit doesn't really get real until you're through the Presidio and onto the other side; the stretch through Caspar and Ft. Bragg makes the "happy cows come from California" ads seem true. The Mendocino Coast redefines "bucolic."I'm really falling in love with the greater Santa Barbara area - I always partied there since a ton of my friends went to UCSB, but it's such a great location once you look past the college party animals - less traffic than LA, mountains and a lake on one side, state beaches on the other.
I found the town of Lompoc a bit trashy, but it was 4th of July and I had fireworks so I was happy, and so were the rest of the drunk firework setting-off families. I really want to take a good chunk of time off and do a real drive up the coast with no destination or time constraints, just wandering and exploring and taking in the majestic views. We drove the 1 instead of the 101 the last time we went to Jalama and it was gorgeous. We stopped off in Carpenteria & Summerland to get gas and do a bit of exploring - see the views and the beaches. I would be so satisfied if I could do that all the way up the coast. Summerland is the most adorable little thing -, antique shops, surf boutiques, summer cottages on a hill, with the most badass liquor store gas station combo. I found a $100 bottle of mezcal in their damn gas station! Thanks for the advice. I cant wait to explore. I'll definitely reach out to you when I get my time off request approved. It's going to be a bit though. Maybe in the spring :/
That was my bachelor party to myself. Swine Flu was in the news and I needed to get married in a week. I was in Los Angeles and my wife was in Seattle. I had a few days on a Davis Guggenheim documentary, but I opted to drive my Dodge Stealth up the coast the slow way instead. Took five days, I think. Went to the Monterey Aquarium (the first place I realized that such things are more interesting with children, therefore it might be worth having one), the Tillamook Air Museum, stopped wherever I wanted to. Oddly enough, because I was doing research for a script, I had the first five books in the Left Behind series on audio. Kinda wild - ripping up the coast listening to the Christian Apocalypse while giving the overblown concerns of CNN enough credo to force me to do what I really wanted to in the first place.