Waves, Missions and Cocktails

It’s been a short night. Up early this morn to pack and to pick up our rental car - this time a VERY small car, smallest we've ever had. Downtown offices aren’t necessarily the best choice to get a rental and, also, booking through tour operators isn’t necessarily a good deal. We have made our own experiences with that now.

Anyway, drove the tiny little Ford back to the hotel, loaded our luggage with a lot of cursing and departed. We skipped the thought to still stop at Golden Gate Park for a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition in the DeYoung Museum since it took us a good hour to get out of town. Traffic is crazy in San Francisco and drivers aren't the best ones in the U.S.

Stopped at Pigeon Point Lighthouse - great views! - and drove partly on Hwy. 1, partly inland on Hwy. 101 to make up time. Hwy. 1 is mostly 45-55 mph only and that takes time. We noticed extended monocultures in the Salinas Valley, mostly cabbage, artichokes and strawberries, some oil pumps, and towards Paso Robles vineyards of enormous dimensions. Back to the coast at Morro Bay, which was our first overnight stop on the coast during our very first U.S. trip in 1982.

Having driven almost 300 mi. to San Luis Obispo we arrived at the famous Madonna Inn - about which even Umberto Eco has written about - at 4:30 pm, and checked into our „Travelers’ Suite“ - huge hall (esp. compared to the room we had before in the San Remo), oversized furniture, fireplace - sort of strange, but memorable. We were given a tour on the property shortly after check-in and then had about 1,5 hours to freshen up, write down notes and dress up for dinner.

Explored the nice little town „SLO“, very clean, attractive main street, some historic buildings. Main attraction is Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa , a Spanish mission founded in 1772 by Father Junípero Serra, which we visited before dinner at Luna Red.

Wouldn’t have thought that it’s still possible to exceed our culinary experiences. Here we had six different „tapas“, very creative - partly vegetarian, fish, meat and cheeses, mexican, peruvian, californian - each of it a piece of art and highly delicious. Dishes went well with their „hand-crafted cocktails“...