Santa Barbara -> Monterey -> San Francisco
Temp: low 20s, cool breezes, patches of sunshine
This post by: Crystal
The past couple of days have involved quite a bit of driving. We only covered a distance of less than 400 miles, but the terrain made the drive a little slower in parts.
TAGTEAM ACTIVATED
Craig here, taking over the writing -- we've had the Day Three Slump, so we're both feeling a bit whacked. So Crystal is chilling in the hotel room with Dog the Bounty Hunter on TV while I tap out some Tales of the Road Trip. Dog is an open-shirt kinda guy with waist-length peroxide hair and what appears to be an 80 year old face
and 85 year old silicon wife.
Class! How classy? When the peroxide wife pulls on her 'bounty huntin' gloves', her hot-pink manicured nails poke through special fingertip slits in the black leather. You gotta look good when taking down a crack den.
But anyway, back to the road trip! We woke up bright and early at 6am Tuesday morning in Santa Barbara... and promptly fell back asleep until 10.30am, missing the included hotel breakfast. So we went into town instead, which turned out great!
Santa Barbara is a real laid-back, seaside town, with Spanish buildings and a million US flag-lined streets.
We found the one veggie meal at Joe's of Santa Barbara (a diner), then got our US sim cards sorted for phones. Once again, we were mistaken for English tourists. Gotta work on the outback drawl. Streuth.
The road trip hit full swing, as we nailed 8 hours of driving on mostly awesome coastal and national park roads.
Here's a video of part of the trip:
We tried to see the much-loved Hearst Castle, but got there at closing time (the sleep-in bites again!), so instead buried ourselves in some high-sugar apple pie and a coffee THAT HAD US TWITCHING FOR HOURS.
We arrived at Monterey -- home of the annual jazz festival -- in the early evening, eschewing the nice, bayside hotel for a cheap and awesome number, in between a vacant lot and a porno theatre. The class continues.
Dinner kicked ass! We really pitched camp at the centre of awesomeness. First up, there was the time-warped Italian restaurant, where I swear we were not only the youngest people there, but the only LIVING people there.
Tables of old ghosts, who I assume reappear every night to hear the ghost band playing 60s Dean Martin classics. It was... classic! Like Cocoon, but dead!
We had good food, then closed the night off with 4 games of ten pin bowling across the road.
To sum up the bowling, we were treated to the theme from COPS, blaring over the lanes (bad boys, bad boys, whatchoo gonna do?) and a Sweet Home Alabama/Werewolves of London mashup, while images of bikini ladies having toilet paper races and Earlobe-Fu guys lifting 15 bricks with an earlobe filled the TV screens above. Hyeppy thaaaames!
And fully, that was Day 3!
Day 4 started with a bit of an American classic, breakfast at Denny's (it was right across the road... how could we resist?!) So we had a very brown breakfast... hash browns, toast, pancakes, coffee.
The only contrast came from Crystal's smuggled-in Vegemite, squeezed discreetly from a tube like some sort of Yeast Extract Ninja.
We drove by the beautiful sand dunes of Monterey on our way to the big city and eventually landed:
San Francisco, one of our favourite cities around. We did another classic (bought $10 jeans at Old Navy) and ate WAY too much Mexican food for lunch, then fully CRASHED OUT. Oh yes, day 4 seems to be the slump day on overseas trips, where jetlag and faked sleep times smack each other around and result in a KNOCK OUT.
A quick nap, then onto a fake meat restaurant for dinner (you really gotta go, it's awesome: Golden Era Vegetarian Restaurant).
And for dessert: JUNK FOOD OF THE DAY!
A double-whammy tonight: Craig chowed down on a Lumpy Bumpy Bar, which was like a Picnic and a Snickers, smashed together into a cacophany of gooey goodness, and Crystal tried the "Bimbos Donas", packaged mexican doughnuts that sadly don't taste as great as the name sounds to a couple of jetlagged gringos. But please, give generously to the Bimbo Donas Appeal.
Which brings us up to now. Dog the Bounty Hunter finished in an anti-climactic fashion, and now we're watching Plastic Surgery Man, Cesar Millan, do some seriously incredible things with dogs in 'The Dog Whisperer'.
But that's another story.
1 comment:
Yay, cool! That is an awesome coastal drive, hope you're sticking on the coast and going the scenic route up to Seattle through Oregon, so much pretties... and Sea Lions.
Also I drove through it without realising at the time, but Astoria (right on the Washington/Oregon border) is where Kindergarten Cop was set, I always wanted to have a look around there cos it's pretty :) Not so exciting on google maps though.
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