California Coast: Malibu to San Luis Obispo

We just spent four days camping along the coast. After having spent a week at Laguna Beach, we camped two nights at Pt Mugu State Park just north of Malibu and then two nights at Morro Strand State Beach further up the coast.

The campground at Pt Mugu was just beautiful, nestled in a sycamore grove at the base of a canyon and just across the road from the beach. It was just a couple of miles from the beach where all of the Gidget movies were filmed. At Pt. Mugu, the girls became friendly with two very nice little boys in the next campsite (Wyatt and Kevin), photos above. One of the best parts of roadtrips are the friends you make along the way.

After Pt Mugu, we headed north to Morro Bay, where we camped two nights at a campground on the beach. That campground was a little like camping in a parking lot- but, on the plus side, it was on the beach.

While heading up the coast, we made a side trip to Solvang. Solvang strives to be a "little Denmark". We added it to our running list of towns that wished they were in Europe. See photo above of the girls with the ornamental windmill in the background. A prominent citizen in this area (Los Olivos) is Fess Parker: you know, Davieee, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. He owns a resort and vineyard here. I guess he is sort of like what Clint Eastwood is to Carmel.

After leaving Morro Bay, we drove along the Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur, along the Monterey Peninsula up to San Francisco. We're a bit behind schedule, so sadly couldn't linger. We figured that area- Big Sur & Monterey- deserves to be done right, so we put off touring it until another trip, rather than just rush from place to place.

The weather here is really interesting. All the way up to San Francisco the temperature on the coast was between 60 and mid-70s during the day. Just a few miles inland- 5 or 10 miles, temperatures were 20 to 30 degrees higher.

We have really, really enjoyed the time we've spent on the California Coast. This is absolutely an area we would come back to.

Disneyland

Two thumbs up for Disneyland. Even though it was peak season and the park was very crowded, Disneyland was really enjoyable. (And the adults on the trip are not generally big Disney fans). We found it to be much less stressful than Disneyworld in Florida; maybe because it's smaller. Whatever the reason, it was just a very nice day.

San Juan Capistrano

The Mission of San Juan Capistrano, only a few miles from Laguna Beach, where we're staying, is one of the better known of the chain of Spanish missions along the California coast. It is popular thanks to the song and the legend about the swallows returning each year on St. Joseph's Day. Grace and Irene (who both like historical re-creations and living history exhibits) visited the mission today. It was a really enjoyable trip; it takes about two hours to tour the mission complex, the museum exhibits and gardens. It was interesting for us because as East Coasters, we know less than we should about the Spanish colonization of the West Coast.

Legoland

Legoland, in Carlsbad California (between Los Angeles and San Diego), was something of a disappointment. In its defense, though, it is peak visitor season and the park might be much more enjoyable if it were less crowded. As it was, it was very expensive ($240 for the four of us) and then there were a lot of "extras" on top: $3 for the climbing wall, $10 to park,$8 for a happy meal, and so on. One felt a little nickel and dimed and it didn't really seem worth the money. In addition to the mini-land, (Legoland re-creations of various cities and monuments) there were also a number of kiddie rides. The lines for the rides were very long, made longer by the fact that so many adults- without accompanying children- were riding them. In one sense, its hard to figure out why adults would want to go on rides clearly intended for little kids, but on the other hand, after paying $75 bucks for a ticket, maybe some of those folks are saying, at this price, I am going to ride the choo-choo train no matter what anyone says.

It's also hard to figure out why the adult ticket costs more than the children's ticket in a place like this. One would assume that most of the adults there (except the ones riding the kiddie cars by themselves) are only there to accompany their kids: shouldn't the adult ticket be less not more than the child ticket in a child's park?

Irene went to the Legoland outside of London when it first opened (sometime in the 90s?) and remembered it very fondly. The re-creations of the various cities are totally cool and worth seeing (just not at this price). We probably wouldn't go there again.

Above is picture of the girls with a Lego-man and also a photo of Lucy being rescued from the climbing wall. She made it halfway up then froze like a cat in a tree. One of the workers had to climb up and bring her down. Grace made it all the way up to the top.

Laguna Beach, California

We'll be spending a week in Laguna Beach, California with Mike's brother, Pat. Laguna Beach is just gorgeous: for a visitor, it seems like a perfect beach town. It has a huge summer-long arts festival, tons of public beaches and good shopping and restaurants. Most importantly: it's beautiful. The weather is just wonderful right now, and the house we're staying in, like many of the houses here, is on a hill overlooking the Pacific. We completely understand why people live in Southern California. Above is a picture of Laguna Beach from their tourism site (link in the sidebar) as well as a picture of Mike and Pat on Pat's deck.

Primm, Nevada

This was so far a low point in our trip. We're heading to Laguna Beach and needed a place to break our journey before crossing the California Desert. We chose Primm, right at the Nevada/California border. Primm is made up entirely of three casino resorts (all low budget). We stayed at the most low-budget of all, Buffalo Bill's. This might have just been a nice affordable weekend for some folks there; but for all too many it looked like they were spending their rent money. Casinos are really good at separating people from their cash: this place was really dark, so you couldn't tell whether it's night or day (No," oops, the sun's coming up, I should call it a night and head home"), no clock to be found anywhere in the place, the pool shuts down at 8:00 so nothing to do but hit the casino, and all amenities radiate around the gaming area, you have to cross the casino floor to get to the hotel, restaurant, kiddie game area, etc.

On some level, though, the low-end places are more honest about what their business is all about. The industry likes to glamorize itself by calling it "gaming" rather than "gambling" and their customers "players" instead of "gamblers". The fancier places may have nice restaurants, showgirls, albino tigers and Blue Man Group, but, in the words of our President, it's all lipstick on a pig. We were pretty glad to leave.

The Mojave Desert was blazing hot (of course), and where we came through, there were a number of very odd looking mines- salt or gypsum or something. It looked like a scene out of a science fiction movie. General Custer said about another desert "It's like Hell without the fires"; that kind of nails the Mojave in July.

One bright spot: about an hour southwest of Primm, in the middle of the Mojave, we stopped for breakfast in Baker,California, home of the world's largest thermometer and this terrific over-the-top Greek Diner, the Mad Greek Cafe. Photo above.

Grand Canyon

We're leaving the Grand Canyon today after a two night stay. A lot of people told us, "it sounds cliche, but you must go to the Grand Canyon. It's something you can't miss." They are right; everyone must see the Grand Canyon.

More than 90% of Grand Canyon visitors go to the South Rim, so we went to the North Rim, to avoid the crowds. We came up from the South, so went through the Painted Desert and by the Vermillion Cliffs before we started to go up into the Kaibab National Forest and then to the Grand Canyon. When we were down around 4,000 feet in the desert, it was about 100 degrees at 11:00 a.m. When we came up to the Canyon, at 8,000 feet, we were surrounded by a beautiful pine forest and the temperature dropped more than 30 degrees!

It was so beautiful and comfortable we decided to stay two days. We stayed at Jacob Lake Inn, in the National Forest about 45 miles from the rim. The Inn was built in 1923 and is a classic mountain lodge,with cabins and motel units and a restaurant/ gift shop. We would definitely stay here again.

The recession is impacting tourism. No matter where we go, we have no problem finding a place to stay or signing up for recreational activites- raft trips, etc- on the spot. Nothing seems to be booked anywhere. The Grand Canyon Lodge was booked, but even that place had vacancies later in the week; the Lodge is the sort of place you would expect to be booked for the Summer at this point. This is really too bad for the comunities that rely on tourist dollars; I hope things pick up soon.