so cal road trip day numero trois

oh goodness, just realized i never published THIS post. you all can have a wee break from reading about tokyo and revisit southern california in april....

after lunch in san luis obispo, we attempted to drive to lompoc; for some reason the map kept changing on us, and didn't correspond at all to where the california state highway system thought lompoc should be, but never mind, the drive was gorgeous, and we stopped at a roadside fruit stand and bought three massive punnets of strawberries from an old man in a big hat which kept us going. we drove through guadalupe, a dusty little outpost that nearly fit my criterion of no starbucks/walmart/barnes and noble/etc but it didn't have much of anything else either - just a wide street with some shops that went out of business in 1952 and forgot to tell anyone. once we got to lompoc we forgot why it was that we were supposed to be going there - something to do with swallows? no, that's san juan capistrano - but as it turns out the beach just beyond lompoc is quite fabuloso and totally deserted. we went on a tromp along the beach and saw lots of birds - several places we have been are nesting sites for snowy plovers, which are apparently making a comeback, so yay hooray for the snowy plover (not that i knew what a snowy plover was before this holiday). i lay in the sand and read my book (swallowdale, in an incongruously adult looking edition, loan courtesy of Mr. Meep, who i am gratified to find out enjoys them as much as i do) and got sand in my ears (fine) and in my camera (less fine, but i am hoping that my camera makes as confident a comeback as the snowy plover.

after a snooze on the beach, we continued on our way towards santa barbara, stopping at la purisima mision de la virgen de somewhere, which was kind of a random unintended detour but i think may in the end have been one of most interesting little cultural thingies we have seen so far. it's a not-so-little spanish mission in the middle of nowhere, which really helps, and the visitor center at the entrance was closed, which really helped as well because it meant that there was almost nobody there and we could just wander around and stick our noses into things and probably touch things that we weren't supposed to, etc., and they had done a very nice job of making it feel as if the sixteenth century spanish missionaries had just put down their things and wandered off but would be back any moment.

after all that, we went onto santa barbara, where we checked in to our relatively tatty motel on state street, and then went out to indian food and then home to BED.

wednesday- santa barbara mission, lunch at natural cafe, walk along santa barbara beach, birdwatching, icecream, botanic garden, home for dinner in bed (looxury!).

thursday - getty museum wowee, sushi dinner w/ nice friend in LA, and then to best western in san fernando where my mother wanted to move in

friday - long drive home to san francisco past scary industrial agricultural areas, reinforcing belief in only eating organic food and, if you are going to eat meat, definitely only meat from happy cows etc.

so cal road trip day numero deux

Oh dear oh dear I have gotten behind and now I am not going to be able to REMEMBER

everything that we've done! I think I will have to go back to the beginning to remind

myself.

Sunday - SF in the pouring rain. sister with a cold. dinner at delfina's.

Monday - drive down to big sur, lunch at nepenthe, elephant seals on the beach!, and Hearst castle. oh, that's right. I was going to do some more describing of Hearst Castle. so, yuh, La Cuesta Encantada, a.k.a. Hearst Castle, is a folly built by megamegamegamega bajillionaire W.R.Hearst once he inherited his parents' bajillions on top of his own bajillions. I was expecting a huge tacky over-the-top Hollywood extravaganza, which it kind of is, except for there are bits of it which are not at all tacky (although the over-the-top adjective applies fairly consistently throughout the whole thing). As soon as the guide (an incredibly mellow middle aged lady with navy orthopedic shoes and a ponytail who had been leading tours at the Hearst Castle for over thirty years, and somehow still managed to make it sounds like she a) enjoyed it and b) had never had to repeat herself once in thirty years) told us Julia Morgan's general concept for the place was for the main house to look like a 17th century Spanish cathedral and for the surrounding guest cottages to look like senorial houses around the cathedral, I liked it much better. Somehow it makes it nicer that there was a particular specific architectural look they

were going for, rather than, let's make it as crazy ornate and luxurious as we can and

to hell with the final product. I think I liked the guest houses better than the main house as well - the gist was Mediterranean villas with old tiles and splashy antique fountains, furnished with heavy dark wood antique Spanish furniture and medieval/early Renaissance artwork, my fave my fave. The high tack came mostly in the form of sculpture - he'd bought a few gen-yoo-wine 18th century French & Italian bits and pieces, but several of the reclining marble ladies around the pool were 1920's movie starlets who were supposed to look like 18th century french ladies, and they looked much too doe-eyed and flirty to be convincing. We watched a promotional/descriptional film about W.R.Hearst, which (I love this) had actors acting out the events described in the voiceover but not speaking themselves (W.R.Hearst's father straining with his mule team, grubby and sweaty, over the Sierras, bags laden with mined ingots which turned out to be silver, WRH's mother looking over the prow of the ship, one hand on the shoulder of her little boy, looking meaningfully into the middle distance where Europe was - Europe being a metaphor for 'future taste in art,' I guess - WRH as an fat middle aged man looking meaningfully into the middle distance standing on his property and then pointing with his stick where he wants his house to be, etc.). The other interesting thing about the Hearst Castle was how lowbrow the visitors' center was: no reproductions of some of the gorgeous paintings/tapestries, for instance, nothing British Museumy about it at all, but you can buy sweatshirts with "Hearst Castle Athletic Team" block printed in a million different colours, shot glasses with a silhouette of the castle, DVD's of the hokey promotional video, etc. Anyway. My only regret is that we couldn't wander freely on our own and (for instance) sit and draw in the gardens) but instead had to keep marching on the official tour. They do several official tours, one which is apparently a little more free-form of the gardens etc. and that might be nice.

That evening we drove down to Morro Bay, where we spent night at the Twin Dolphin Inn -

while I have no trouble staying at tatty motels, it is surprising how difficult it has been to persuade la mama to at least stay at independently owned tatty motels rather than

chain tatty motels...

On Tuesday morning, we drove to San Luis Obispo, which is one of those places that I have

heard of five million times but completely without context, so I had no idea whether it was

going to be a shitty industrial center or a gorgeous little Spanish architectural gem or

what. Here's my ideal of an American town: somewhere that has a nice town center, like

(for instance) San Luis Obispo (sunshine, bougainvillea, Spanishy architecture, nice

pedestrian streets), but that is _not_ surrounded by miles of car dealerships and

Burger Kings. I have yet to see that. The other depressing fact is how ubiquitous so many

of the shops are: it really reinforces the message that it is becoming less and less worth-

while to travel, at least within the US, because everywhere there is a Starbucks, a Wal-Mart,

a Barnes & Noble, a 7-11, a Whole Foods, etc. But I digress. We spent the morning at the

SLO mission, drawring in the sunshine in the garden (la mama did a very pretty drawring

of a fountain, palm trees etc and I did one of a petit fleur) and then we took ourselves

off for lunch at an outdoor cafe next to the creek which was tres jolie and our waiter

flirted with la mama about his love of landscape painting.

oh dear almost time to go i will finish this later.

love to all.

so cal road trip day numero un

why does blogspot always load the photos in reverse? so annoying. anyway.

so hurrah! La mama and I left on our southern california adventure yesterday. we spent the night in san francisco, where I got to go to delfina's for dinner (and have gnocchi and chicken and panna cotta) and la mama got to stay at sister's house and try and dodge flu bugs. i think i won that particular contest. we got up the next morning and packed up the car and drove through magically nonexistant san francisco traffic to Big Sur on the coast which was GORGEOUS, all windy cliff roads and sunshine and crashy waves and rocks and lovely lovely lovely

....and then had lunch at cafe kevah, which is the slightly more downmarket (and i actually think nicer) version of nepenthe restaurant (we went upstairs to look at nepenthe after our lunch, and it was full of fat people eating steaks with ketchup with designed sunglasses on their heads).

after lunch we drove on down the coast towards Hearst Castle, stopping to say hello to some heffalump seals (we passed a beach with literally hundreds of them slothing about looking as if they had just had a really big fish breakfast and couldn't be bothered to move apart from occasionally flipping some sand onto their backs to cool down (fascinating fact: apparently when lady elephant seals are in labour, they do a lot of sand-flipping onto their backs, so it's thought to be a stress response of some sort. we also saw lots of juveniles (who are about four months old by now) which were very cute. they are molting, which they do once a year, so several of them were looking very ratty with big patches of their fur peeling off, and one of the docent chiquitas showed us a patch of elephant seal fur, and it was about as cuddly and soft as a pot scrubber.

after THAT we drove onto Hearst Castle which I was secretly expecting to be kind of lame, a 1950's hollywood version of a medieval castle, with 1950's hollywood versions of suits of armor and heraldic flags everywhere, but it was way cooler than that. eek more later b/c we are supposed to be getting packed up to leave soon.

hearst castle (the _indoor_ pool, smaller than the outdoor pool, all blue and gold pseudo roman mosaics). i wanted to SWIM SO BADLY

mystery birds along the shore at morro bay where we had a sushi picnic on the beach for dinner and then went back to the twin dolphin motel and spent la nuit.

on to san luis obispo mission and santa barbara today. ok must post this before internet connection craps out completely.

love to all!