Wow, 60 days of travel, packing and unpacking, booking hotels, deciding where to go next and seeing so much stuff! Time has certainly flown. Unfortunately this wasn’t one of the more interesting or exciting days! We stayed on the coastal route (US 1) from Monterey and drove through Carmel-by-the-Sea, which is a lovely and clearly affluent town with many expensive cars and houses around. It was very busy though and we couldn’t find anywhere to park so I just took some drive-by pictures. There was some fog hanging over the sea, which probably should have warned us about what the rest of the trip was going to be like! The US 1 is supposed to be very scenic and I guess it probably was under all the fog, but we saw very little of it! The route is also very well known with many people driving it, and much, much busier than the rest of the coast road we’ve driven so far. With so many people (and bad driving) everywhere it is hard to stop anywhere anyway, but when we did we mostly saw fog. And more fog. Here and there we saw some nice views but it is a shame the weather didn’t play along. We also drove through San Luis Obispo where we originally planned to stay and it looked like a really nice town, full of life and restaurants and nice buildings and bars, but we had to push on and drive another hour to Lompoc.
We arrived in Lompoc about 4pm and got a room in the Motel 6 that was ready, before putting our washing on and sitting down to try and finalise our route for the rest of the trip. It isn’t really necessary to completely finalise it, but I am erm, a planner after all, and I like knowing where I’m heading and what it is going to cost and how long it will take. I think we’ve pretty much worked out a route that won’t kill us, and now all that remains is to book accommodation further ahead. Hotels.com has been very handy, as you get a free night for every 10 nights that you book through them and even though they generally charge a fee on top of the hotel’s flat rate, it is still worth it as I book everything through them. In some cases when we’ve checked rates at the hotels, we’ve actually paid less via hotels.com so they may not always be the pricier option.
Once our washing was dry we ventured out to a pizza place (Mi Amore Pizza & Pasta) where we got a pitcher or beer and a 14” pizza for $20, which is cheap! It is a bit like an informal diner and you place your order at the bar. The pizza was huge and very nice, but between us (I also had chicken wings) we only managed half of it. We didn’t see much more of Lompoc as it was purely a stopover on our way to LA so I can’t comment on what it is like!
Biltong and Burger 