After three days in San Francisco, we sadly had to move on. To get us on our way, we drove up a hill, down a hill and then up another hill until we found ourselves on the i-101 on our way to visit the i-World of Apple Headquarters in Cupertino. We last visited the Apple 'Mother Ship' in August of 2007 and we were keen to see if anything had changed. What we discovered was that their parking lot seemed to have shrunk or perhaps there were way more people visiting their home base. Just to visit the Apple Store, required us to triple park using a free valet - we took our i-Ticket in exchange for our car keys and hoped for the best. Inside the store, Colin bought himself a t-shirt and another as a souvenir for his brother.
Our mission completed, we traded in our i-Ticket for our car keys and navigated our way west to the Pacific Coast Highway. We followed the highway through Santa Cruz and Monterey to Carmel-by-the-Sea. The little town of Carmel is very pretty, it once had Clint Eastwood for a mayor and Melissa has often compared it to Niagara-on-the-Lake - on crack. We stopped and had a look around at the beautiful, but quite expensive boutique stores and ate lunch out on the patio of the Treehouse Cafe, having at last shed our scarfs and jackets.
After lunch we continued along the Coastal Highway to our destination of Cambria. This ended up taking longer than we thought and soon we watched the sun set, while we traveled along the beautiful, twisty, windy roads that hugged the ocean. As the dusk was descending we could hear the many elephant seals, who lay on the beach ready to retire for the night.
We really lucked out in choosing our accommodations in Cambria. Our hotel was a resort complex not far from Hearst Castle in San Simeon. It was very much like Christmas and Valentine's day all rolled into one! There was a beautiful cat named Smokey that greeted us at check-in and there was a real fire place in our comfortable room (yeah!). We enjoyed a lovely meal on the hotel restaurant patio where we sat right next to another fireplace. We met a couple of other travelers who were visiting from Santa Barbara and they said we were gnarly when we described our road trip to them. Going back to our 80's valley-speak vernacular, we think that was a compliment. After dinner, we followed the dark path lined with pixie lights through the secret gardens back to our room. It really was an oasis of beauty!
We (again) watched a movie called Sideways (starring Paul Giamatti) which is about a road trip through the Southern California wine regions. We watched this movie, because we would be passing through some of the filming locations on our way to Anaheim.
We stopped in Solvang for lunch at a place called Succulent Cafe. Solvang is a randomly located Danish community, which greatly influences the food and art available in this village. We also took a detour to Buellton to see the Hitching Post restaurant that was featured in the Sideways movie. Alas, we didn’t stop this time, as we had done so on our previous trip here in 2007.
After enjoying our lunch, we set off towards Anaheim via LA. This included, at no extra cost, sitting in two extra hours of grinding, excruciatingly slow LA traffic during the Friday night rush hour. This didn't get us down though, because just one more sleep and we would be living the Disneyland Dream! Melissa had picked a hotel that was just eight minutes walk to the grounds (So excited). We got up early, headed over to the Disney entrance and were let in half an hour early to Main Street Disney where we both waited excitedly for the Rope Drop to the rides to happen. Today, according to the 'Touring Plans’ iPhone App, would have a level of busyness of eight out of ten, and you could definitely believe it with the hoards of Disney fans roaming the grounds already. Finally, the rope dropped and we raced over to the ‘Peter Pan’s Flight’ ride – which, even though we were early, took just under an hour of waiting. This extremely long wait time (hey this is LA – people are used to this sort of waiting) went quickly, as we were constantly moving forward. That, plus the atmosphere of being there – and, at last it was a shorts and t-shirt weather day! We followed up with the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ ride, which broke down midway. This was kind of like falling down a rabbit hole, as we were lead out by a 'cast' member. We loved this, because it gave us a unique perspective as we were taken past the - now still - animatronic characters, through a small office set up with computer and disassembled ride cars and down the fire escape. Not quite the usual exit through the gift shop! For our trouble, we were given a pass to go right to the front of the line when this ride was fixed later in the day.
We basically spent the entire day there, trying each of the rides. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ & the ‘Indiana Jones Adventure’ were amazing. We also got to have a preview of ‘Hyperspace Mountain’ which is the new ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ themed ride. This roller-coaster wasn’t even supposed to be available until the following week, but it was ‘soft launched’ on the day we where there. The cast members would 'neither confirm nor deny that there could be a ride that we might queue up for, but we shouldn’t count on it, no no not at all, wink, wink...' So we did queue up, surrounded by a full collection of Star Wars fan-boys and fan-girls wearing their t-shirts, counting down the days until the movie is released. After a 45-minute wait, we were strapped into a metal ‘spaceship’ that blasted upwards as the Star Wars theme music blared out at you. It was exhilarating, and we both were a bit dizzy from motion sickness upon exiting!
Colin's favourite ride was of course 'It's a Small World' - or as known by cast members, just 'Small World'. At this time of year, the incessant song that gets into your brain also has an additional Christmas theme mixed into it. We went along to sample this ride early in the day and when we went back at nighttime, it was completely glowing with Christmas lights and looked amazing from the outside. The wait time had gone from 20 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes. We decided not to wait again and we went home exhausted, having walked around 25,000 steps with 10,000 having been from standing in the many Disneyland queues.
The next day we bid farewell to Anaheim and Disneyland and headed to our next stop - San Diego. On our way we stopped in Laguna Beach, which was a totally cool, trendy place if a tad expensive for our tastes. It was also the setting for 'The Hills', a reality TV show which happens to be one of Melissa’s guilty pleasures.
Our stay in San Diego, one of the mildest climates in all of America, would be for a whole four nights – all in a row! While we were there, we pretty much only ate the local specialty - Fish Tacos. One of our favourite places for this was at Michos in the Gaslamp district. This was located inside Atomic, which was a restaurant until 9 pm, then turned into a nightclub afterwards. We old folks went early for the food and then headed out of there, before the dance party began.
On the next day, Colin visited Tijuana, Mexico by tour bus, while Melissa chose not to go. Colin felt right at home on the tour which included three Canadian's, a married couple from Dublin, Ireland and a young guy from Perth, Australia. Colin hung out with the traveling Aussie and was blown away by the amount of traveling that he had done and would do on his own trip – it’s hard to keep an Australian traveler down, really.
Colin really enjoyed discovering Tijuana, which was so close to San Diego. The local people were all really friendly in what was admittedly a tourist location. His group was basically the only group of 'outsiders', as problems in recent years have impacted tourism to the area. However, TJ was still very colourful with lots of tacos and alcohol available at super cheap rates. One thing that Colin found to be a little odd was the Zonkey's - where you can be photographed with a donkey that was painted to look like a Zebra (zonkey…get it?) . The couple of hours spent exploring this location was a very positive experience. The whole ordeal of going through customs, which worried Colin a little, was not an issue and everyone from the group made it back all right.
On our last day in San Diego, Melissa and Colin drove to nearby Coronado where they had lunch at Miguel’s. This restaurant served the best ceviche and tacos, that they had tasted all trip. If only we had known! Colin and Melissa rounded up their visit to San Diego by visiting nearby La Jolla Beach and Balboa Park.
Next Up: From Desert to Snow Peaked Mountains in Arizona
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