California Adventure Day 3: Pismo Beach to Carmel

We woke up fairly early, enjoyed our contintental breakfast, and hit the road. Our first stop was the Hearst Castle. It was built in the 20's by W.R. Hearst, who basically created modern journalism. He bought one newspaper, and within a few years continued buying newspapers, then created magazines (including Cosmo), and also dabbled in "yellow journalism" which is sensationalized, kinda like tabloids nowadays. Here's the view from the visitor's center:

And with zoom:
Here's us waiting for our tour to start:

We got lucky and got the last two tickets for the 10:20 Tour 1: The Experience, which was only about 15 minutes after we got there. We were interested, but not a hundred percent sold on this activity, but we knew we had to do it. Our tour guide asked if anyone was from a foreign country, when when we said we were from Dallas, he said, "Texas is a foreign country!"

This is the Neptune pool, it's on a terrace as you walk up to where the houses are located. There's a main house, and three guest houses. The tour we were on goes through the main rooms of the main house and one of the guest houses. I couldn't figure out how to get my camera to work without flash so I don't have any interior pictures. The guest house was bigger than our house! Every room was done in antiques from floor to ceilings. That's one of the things Hearst liked to do- collect rare and interesting artifacts and then use them in his house.

View of the main house from one of the terraces. Quite gaudy! In this house, there are original pieces of art. Copies of those pieces of art are in the Louvre!

And here's the indoor pool. There's a starburst design underwater and tiles with gold sandwiched in them. I really wanted to jump in because it was hot outside! Our tour guide was excellent; any question anyone had he knew the answer. You could tell he had charisma, he knew how to get an audience interested and move us through the tour. I forgot to mention that you ride a bus up a winding road from the visitor's center to the house(s). We rode back down and jumped back into the car to continue our adventure!

I knew I wanted a picture of me with my scarf blowing in the wind. Remember, I couldn't make it look cute or glamorous and also work to keep my hair under wraps.

Me: "Hurry up and take it before the road starts winding again! Did you get it?"

Bean: "I took a picture of myself riding."

The road was winding through the mountains and every curve had a sign that said 20 mph, and the signs were right, there was no way to drive fast. I suddenly knew what everyone was saying about that road being fun and beautiful to drive. It was impossible to take in all of the views and concentrate on the road, and I knew Bean was a little jealous because the trip was his idea. But we knew that on the way back down, we would make sure he got to drive this section.

That's some famous bridge that looks really cool and there's a turnoff that you can stop and take pictures. There are lots of turnoffs and we stopped at a few, but mostly we wanted to enjoy the journey. Here's us approaching the bridge:

There's Silver Bullet pretending to be in a car commercial. Several times, a particular view would make us saw "WOW" outloud so we'd stop and take pictures. Usually it was mountains, but on this day, it was this little cove with rocks and waves crashing against them. As the road was curving, we noticed this gorgeous sight:

We kept trying to take pictures of it, and eventually got hungry so we stopped at the next place available. There are little hotels with restaurants and gas stations all built into one on this part of the road for people like us who need to stop and refuel. This particular place had an awesome deck with a view. When we got out of the car, I felt off balance, like I'd been on a roller coaster, just from the winding road! I had their famous fish and chips, and Bean had a healthy california sandwich.

And here's the view we had! :

I told Bean I wanted to get married again on that little grass patch overlooking the ocean. He said ok. We eventually stopped again for a few more pictures:

We started getting into the mountains a little more and we knew we were getting close to Big Sur. We planned to hike a little bit, but the weather was so erratic- it would be 60 degrees, and then swing up to 80, so I didn't know how to dress. Plus I didn't pack very well to begin with. I didn't want to wear shorts again and be cold.

We made it to Big Sur! There were the biggest trees I've seen in my entire life!

Bean was brave enough to jump on top of that big stump, I was afraid I would fall off and hurt myself.

This huge stump tried to attack me!

We started off on a trail that took us to these falls. It was pretty tough! Bean was practically running up the hills and I got out of breath because we'd been sitting constantly and had just finished eating a huge plate of fried food. We didn't even warm up and were going hardcore up that mountain! I was frustrated because I work out more (way more) than he does and I couldn't keep up.

We went back to a fork in the trail and decided to try for the other side. I was cursing that decision, until we made it to the top and got this view:

There was a little bench at the top and if I wasn't so afraid of falling off the mountain, we would have sat there and enjoyed the view a little more. But we had a little more driving to do, and I was ready to get back on that roller coaster!

We made it into Carmel around 6 and as we were sitting at a light, 3 boys rode by on their bikes. They started barking at us! We cracked up and turned onto the street they were riding down. When we caught up to them, we decided to bark back at them. They looked surprised and we laughed all the way to the hotel.

Dad and Connie suggested this hotel because they stayed there when they did this drive last year. It was hard to find because the streets were very small, and there weren't very many stop signs. We made it, got checked in, and asked for a dinner recommendation. The girl suggested an Italian place. I went to find the room while Bean parked the car. Here's the hallway to our room:

It had an actual key instead of a key card! I kept wanting a hotel to have that.

Here's a view of the courtyard. Our room is in the building on the left, and you can see the ocean through the trees! Got changed and went over to the Italian place she recommended, but we needed reservations and the next one they had available was 2.5 hours later! So we walked around the streets and just went into some place. The attitude in the town wasn't our favorite, and there were lots of people 60+. We just felt like we didn't fit in; like we were little kids that didn't deserve good service. I had some pasta with scallops, it was fattening and tasted ok. I also got some of that red sauce on my white shirt! I'm not even clumsy with food!
We did go back to that Italian place because they had a little wine bar connected to it. I convinced Bean to have a flight of wine and taste some of mine. I had a flight of sparkling wine first, always my favorite! And then I had this flight, I don't remember what it was but Bean liked the ones that I didn't like so we traded.
And there's Bean looking very silly:

We headed back to the room and crashed.
That bed was the most comfortable of all of them, and they had great robes that were soft inside and silky outside. I don't remember the ranking on that hotel, Bean didn't like the girl who checked us in, and I didn't like the dinner so it was just an average night.