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The Magic Coast
California's Central Coast and Hearst Castle
- CENTRAL COAST TRIP REPORT
© 2003
by Darryl Musick
It has been some time since we've last visited California's central coast and with a few days off at the end of the year, it seemed like a good time to visit. Well, actually it usually wouldn't be a good time to go with the cold and fog and such, but I gave my wife the choice of desert or coast and she chose coast.
It's New Year's Day and we're watching the Rose Parade as we pack. My son and I had made a visit to one of the local float factories a few days before and were having fun picking out the ones we'd seen being built. My wife then reminded me that if we wait for the end of the parade, we will have hell to drive through in Pasadena.
Quickly, we finish packing, load the van, get some gas and off we go!
Just in the nick of time too. The 210 freeway was a breeze through Pasadena but when we got to Orange Grove, we noticed hordes of people walking across the bridges. The parade had just ended here. Another five minutes and we would have really been stuck.
Many people say there must be a law in Pasadena that it can't rain on New Year's Day. It's hard to argue when the days leading up to it were full of rain, but magically, it is clear as a bell today...probably prompting another 100,000 people to flee the snow and move here (trust me, it's only like this a few days out of the year...the rest of the time it's smoggy, hot, and very crowded!).
We have a gorgeous drive up to San Luis Obispo where we will be staying in the Quality Suites. If you've read our reports on Charleston, Toronto, or Scottsdale, you know that we've had spotty luck on staying at this chain. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. You will be happy to know that we've stayed at the SLO location of Quality Suites six times now and the quality of the room and service are still top notch.
Arrival is at 2 pm, about three and a half hours after we left home. Our room is on the third floor. The hotel has 9 accessible rooms, three on each floor all in the same location (i.e, three rooms on the first floor, three more directly above on the second, and three more above those). My wife wants the third floor because the top floor is usually the quietest in our experience.
The room itself has a lowered peep hole, bars and wide doors in the bathroom, a raised toilet seat, and a wheel-under bath sink. There is no roll-in shower in the hotel. It's a big room, a suite actually, with a bedroom (king size) and a living room with a queen size sofa bed. It was quite clean and comfortable.
The room rate here also includes a full, cooked-to-order breakfast in a pleasant dining room by the pool, a nightly manager's reception serving wine and beer, a USA Today, coffee, high-speed internet terminal (with printer), pool and spa.
Being New Year's Day, it was very slow at the hotel. Less than ten rooms (out of about 200) had been rented that night. Happy hour was quite sedate and quiet. We had some wine, and since it was so slow, the manager let us fill our glasses with premium local wines (usually, a lesser quality house wine is poured but small tastes of local wines are offered). Afterward, we walked to downtown (three blocks), where we peered through the windows of the closed-for-the-holiday shops.
Dinner was at Linn's where we had a light meal at the only place we could find open. It was good.
The next day dawned very bright and warm (the high ended up at 80 degrees). Our plan was to drive up Highway 1 and see what kind of trouble we could get into.
We ate a good breakfast and used the hotel's internet connection to see if we could get into a tour at Hearst Castle. There are four main tours, plus an "accessibility" tour for wheelchairs. Although it says you can make reservations on line, guess which one can't be done that way...
So...I call the number listed for the accessible tour. After waiting on hold for ten minutes, I am told rather abruptly by the operator that this is not the number for that and besides, don't I know that I have to call ten days in advance for those tours? The rude operator gives me another number to call.
I call the other number which connects me to an automated conference calling service. I try two times to make sure I have the right number with the same results. I call back the number for the rude operator. This time I get a much more courteous voice and tell them what happened. They give me a completely different number...I mean, not even close to the other one...to call.
I call and am told there is space available on the 10:20am tour and I take it. This gives me 50 minutes to drive up the coast to San Simeon. We run to the car immediately...
Fortunately, it's only 41 miles to the castle and we make it with ten minutes to spare. Just enough time for a bathroom break before boarding the bus.
The good thing about the accessibility tour is that you go in a very small group. There were five of us compared to about a hundred in a regular tour group. You also get highlights from the other tours and a more personalized experience. The bad thing is that many parts of the castle are inaccessible to you.
We board a small bus with a lift that looked like it had been an airport parking shuttle in a previous life...I think the interior luggage racks gave it away. It's a five mile trip to the top of the hill where William Randolph Hears built his opulent house. Along the way, a tape recorded voice tells a quick history of the property. Originally, over 300 square miles of land (with 80 miles of coastline) belonged to the Hearst family. The Hearst Corporation still owns the 90,000 acre ranch surrounding the 200 or so acres of the state park & house.
At the top of the hill, the tour guide meets our bus in back of the house next to the indoor Roman Pool. Another perk of the accessible tour...we're allowed to go behind the railing back by the dressing rooms and diving platform of this gorgeous pool and dip our hands in the frigid water. With its gold inlays, marble pool ladders, and alabaster lamps, this pool is quite a sight.
Next, we take a golf cart modified to take two wheelchairs up to the back porch of the main house. We follow a path around the house and visit Casa Del Mar, an 8,000 square foot guest "cottage" where Hearst lived while the main house was built and in later years when he was close to death.
We tour the three bedrooms, bathrooms, and living room of the top floor including the room where Hearst himself slept.
After that, back to the main house where we enter the massive
kitchen and food preparation room. After this, the new kitchen my
wife had built last year just doesn't seem adequate...
The massive stove in Hearst's kitchen.
Next, we visit the main living room where Hearst would appear through a secret panel to greet his guests. Two copies of my house could fit in this room.
We slip through a panel ourselves into the massive dining room
with its pennants, banners, and old church choir seats. The high
ceilings and long table remind my son and myself of the great hall of Hogwarts
in the Harry Potter books and movies. No enchanted ceiling however.
Hearst's dining room.
Off to the smaller living room where guests could take off their coats and relax a little bit while playing billiards in the next room or seeing movies in the adjacent movie theater.
The tour is finished off with a view of the outdoor Neptune Pool, one of the castle's most distinctive features. Alas, it's a view from above as poolside is not accessible.
On the road down, we hear about Hearst's private zoo, see some deer, drive by the old bear cages, and exit in the parking lot. Before we leave, we see an Imax movie about the castle's construction.
As we leave San Simeon to the south, we see some zebras grazing in the field, descendants of Hearst's original herd.
It's now after 2:00 and we're getting hungry so we have an early dinner at the Great American Fish Company in Morro Bay. It has a great view of Morro Rock and of the fishing boats just outside. The biggest surprise is that to food is very good being that the rule of restaurants is the better the view, the worse the food and service is. I did have to remind our server once that I ordered a steak, not a prime rib sandwich, but she accepted my correction with good humor and was a great server. My wife had an excellent bowl of cioppino while Tim had the usual burger and fries.
We followed the meal with a walk around Morro Bay's small waterfront. It's a mix of the usual souvenir shops, restaurants, and bars. There's also a tiny aquarium where you can feed sea lions and a number of tour boats, including an undersea tour boat like we went on in Maui.
A sea otter lounged on his back as we took in the fading sun over the bay.
After this evening's happy hour, attended by about twice as many
people as the evening before, we had some barbecue by the pool (on weekdays,
the hotel sets up a grill at dinner time and sells some cheap dinners)
before retiring for the night.
Looking down the coast towards Morro Bay. Morro Rock is visible in the distance.
The breakfast bar was pretty busy the next morning although when I checked with the front desk, there were still only twenty rooms rented out. Today, we are heading up the coast to Cayucos.
Cayucos, which lies on the coast four miles north of Morro Bay, is a classic California beach town. The waves were pumping up to 12 feet this day and we were quite content to watch the surfers ride them in from our perch on the old pier there. We also walked through the old town and browsed the shops and hotels to see what they had available for future visits.
Two inns stood out for accessibility and would make a great place to stay for a beach vacation, one reasonable and one expensive.
The reasonable accommodation is the Cayucos Beach Inn which has not one but two rooms with roll-in showers and lowered closet bars, microwave, & coffee maker within spitting distance of the beach. The rates run $75-110.
If you have some more money to burn and want luxury and location, the Pierpointe Inn at the foot of the pier offers a wheelchair accessible room just steps from the Cayucos pier. It's a large room with a lowered king-size bed (another bed can be brought in), fireplace, oceanfront patio, and a large tub-spa with grab bars. The owner told us she will soon be adding a transfer bench and shower hose. An elevator will take you to the rooftop spa where a pool lift can be used to get you into the pool. There is elevator served underground parking with a van accessible parking spot. Two ramps also adorn the outside of the inn, one to the front door, and one to the end of the building adjacent to the accessible room. Rates here run $150-275.
Both lodging choices come with expanded continental breakfast. We will definitely have to come back for a weekend next summer to try them out.
Our real reason for coming to Cayucos is now upon us...lunch. You see, Cayucos is home to an abalone farm. These bivalves once used to flourish along California's coast until over harvesting made them endangered. Once a common meal item, now it is almost impossible to find in America.
Fortunately, abalone farming is bringing this taste back. but at a price. Currently, farm raised abalone is going for around $50 per pound retail. We came to Cayucos to try this now rare treat.
Which brings us to Hoppe's Garden Bistro. Open for lunch
and dinner, this charming little place offers fine dining either inside
with an ocean view or out in their lush garden. A window side table
was available so we opted for indoors with a view.
Hoppe's Bistro.
The food here was fantastic. We started off with an abalone appetizer and a cheese tray to share. The main courses were a crispy duck salad, pheasant ravioli, and a filet topped with a mushroom wine sauce. We share bites with each other and all three were fantastic, with my favorite being the ravioli, followed closely by the sweet duck and the juicy steak. The abalone was also very good but at such a price it will have to be a very occasional treat right now.
Prices were very reasonable for lunch. Our entrees went from a low of $8 to a high of $12. Of course, with appetizers and wine we quickly blew the budget but this was definitely a splurge for us.
Back in SLO, we decided to make an excursion to nearby Avila Beach. This tiny town sitting in a pocket of San Luis Bay had to be put down. Specifically, the waterfront was completely demolished and is almost rebuilt. The reason behind that lies on top of the hill behind the town.
Union Oil Company has a tank farm up there to store oil for loading tankers at its nearby pier. Over the decades, leaks in the tanks have resulted in a big cloud of oil settling under the town. A lawsuit and many hundreds of millions of dollars later, the town settled with Unocal with the provision that the company would remove the contaminated soil. The only way to get to it was to tear the place down.
So, civic improvement via the Union Oil Company is what's going on in Avila Beach these days. The buildings were removed, the ground dug up, clean soil put in, and about half of the buildings have been rebuilt. The town also sports a spiffy, clean look as compared to it's old grungy one.
It's nice to see one of our favorite restaurants, the Old Customs House, has come back. To bad the new building doesn't have that really neat garden out back that we used to eat in.
Beaches are some of the most tempting and inaccessible places for wheelchairs to go. They bog down in the sand and wood-planked piers rattle kidneys very hard. Luckily, one of the last remaining piers where you can actually drive your car out to the end lives here. It's the historic Port San Luis Pier where you can fish, crab, and give seals handouts.
One of the Central Coast's best restaurants sits on the end overlooking this beautiful cove. That is the Olde Port Inn which has a slightly expensive, but delicious, menu along with an award-winning wine list. Several seafood packing operations here also sell directly to consumers to take home with them.
Here, at night, we sat at the end of the pier, located as it is in the darkened north end of the bay, and stargazed with millions of lights in the inky black sky.
As a kid, I used to come here camping with my parents. You can still park your camper or RV at the lot at the foot of the pier, but free parking is gone and a $20 fee is slapped on overnighters. Still, it's a great place to wake up and breakfast at Fatcats is a real local treat. You can also fish on the pier (or any pier in the state) without a license. Many years ago, four of us caught over 250 snapper in one day. There's not so many today, but it's still a pleasant place to drop a line.
That pretty much wrapped up this trip and we spent one more night in the suite vowing not to wait so long to make it back to this part of the state.
Budget (2 adults & one teenager - three nights)
Gas - $60
Lodging - $403
Food (breakfast included in room rate) - $175
Hearst Castle - $47
Total - $682
Note: We really splurged on a couple of dinners, so you could probably knock $75 of the food price by being a little more frugal. Other lodging choices are available for less but the huge room and the perks at the Quality Suites was definitely worth the price.
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