Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Jun 2012: Day 8 – Oxnard to San Luis Obispo

Woke fairly late for me – 6am.  Vick slept in until 7:30am (yes, after waking at 5 having dreamt Rafa and Djoko were at 9-9 in the fifth set, desperately searched the hotel channels and ended up on the BBC website, anyway Well Done My Boy!) !  Obviously adjusted to the time zone now.

Good late breakfast and then had to endure the France v England game.  We started well but ended up defending for most of the game.  We will need to be far more positive and aggressive against Sweden (our bogey team).

Finally got on the road about 11am, and took the 101/1 up to Santa Barbara.  That didn’t take long and we parked on the pier and grabbed a coffee at a lovely restaurant overlooking the sea.

Santa Barbara is a lovely place, all palm trees and boardwalks in the sunshine.

Our next stop was Lompoc which we spent a night at in 2006 and found a great Mexican restaurant in a back street, but we can’t quite agree on exactly how we came across that place, nor where it was. 

We had the chance to settle that debate but we sailed passed and it became a distant memory (well, at least a memory for me, Nige can’t remember much!)

First thing we did in Lompoc was to go to Home Depot and but Vick a cushion.  Yes a cushion, so that she could see over the dashboard in the car!  There’s no way to increase the height of the passenger seat, so short arse Vick couldn’t see a great deal. 

She feels a lot happier now that she can see which way we are going!  Yeah yeah I know you tall people out there will laugh, well the joke’s on you when flying, right??!

We sought out a Subway for lunch (seems to be our favourite lunch stop), and even asked where the nearest Starbucks was.  Amazingly we chose not to stop and we pushed on for Pismo Beach.  There was nothing especially memorable about the drive today to be honest.

We arrived at the Hilton Garden Inn at Pismo Beach about 3:30pm and asked for a room on the top floor with a good view.  None available, so we got one on the second floor with our own little patio area right next to the swimming pool. 

The best bit about this is we can wear our cossies right out to the pool and not have to get our shorts wet after the swim, coming back through the hotel lobby.

I was glad to find out that the swimming pool was heated and Hilton have done a really good job at making the hotel and swimming pool area really attractive.

A quick dip and a soak in the spa, a bit of chillin’ and gettin’ ready to hit Pismo Beach for dinner.  We went into Pismo Beach and it was misty like nothing on earth – we couldn’t even see the end of the pier. 

Not much choice for dinner but we did find Giuseppe’s which served really good pasta.

Starbucks visited so far this hol: 7; Taco Bell: 1; Subway: 4.  Calories Ingested: who knows? who cares?

Stats for Day 8: 145 miles.

Plan for tomorrow is to drive to Monterey through Big Sur where apparently everything costs double and we have to stop at every flaming beach and view point.  And it has to take us 5 hours to complete 90 miles because that’s what the guide book says…

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