melair

My pooooor little neglected blog <sigh>.  I guess sometimes you just run out of steam talking about yourself.  I have had plenty of adventures lately, but it might mean I have to actually start posting 2-3x a week again to get you all caught up.  That is, if everyone hasn’t already given up on reading Mel-Air.

A few posts back I had started telling you all about my (then) recent trip to San Luis Obispo with Kelly.  I had just finished up writing about the road trip and our stop over in Solvang.  After the road trip portion, we got settled into our hotel room on Pismo Beach.  A very nice little place, despite the millions of bugs in the pool and hot tub (yuck!)

Far better that the room or hotel itself, was our view from the room.

And that, my friends, was my view for the next couple of days as I worked from the hotel room.  Poor Kelly was in a boring ‘ole conference room somewhere learning about city planning during natural disasters, while I worked in my PJs and listened to the soothing sounds of the sea.

During evenings we would go out to dinner and one night went into town.  I was very surprised by how good the restaurants were.  You see, in Orange County, while there are 700 million restaurants, finding a good one is much like finding a needle in a haystack.  Here, with only a couple of handfuls of options, we went 3 for 3 for good eats.  A yummy Italian restaurant, a fun, hip little cafe, and a seafood restaurant that was Deee-lish.  Ugh.  Doesn’t Rachel Ray say dee-lish?  I take it back…it was fabuloso.  That sounds like something lame she’d say too…but you get the point.  The night we went into town and ate at Blue Sky Cafe, we also were able to stop into an adorable little wine shop for a quick tasting.  That was some relief since we had to work days and weren’t able to make it to any of the actual winery tasting rooms because they all close at 5.

Pismo Beach itself was lovely as well.  And it was not crowded at all.  I’m not sure if that is always the case.  Remember tourist season had not yet struck when I was there in April.

By far, though, the most noteworthy site of the whole trip was The Madonna Inn.  Now Kelly kept saying she was going to take me, but not really describing what it was.  Or I should say, in describing things, Kelly tends to dwell on details that don’t interest me…like the history of the place rather than the aesthetic.  The best description I have read so far is directly from the Wikipedia article:

” The Inn is featured in Umberto Eco’s book Travels in Hyperreality (1991). According to Eco, “the poor words with  which natural human speech is provided, cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn…Let’s say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli.”"

My pictures are a little dark, but even in better lighting, I’m not sure a picture could do this place justice.  I literally felt like I was trying to catch my breath the whole time I was walking through it.

My time was brief (3 nights, 2 days), but I made the most of the time I had.  The last morning I was up early and Kelly saw me off to the Amtrak Station before she went back to her training session.  I took the train back home, for 6 long hours.  My Amtrak ride down the California coast was admittedly much more scenic than the trip from Atlanta to New Orleans I took years ago.

Next time I go to San Luis Obispo there will be much more wine tasting involved.  I guarantee it.  Although that probably means fewer pictures and likewise, less coherent narrative.