San Luis Obispo

Hmm, so my first draft of this post reads only : "I love this place and I want to live here."

No kidding. San Luis Obispo is just lovely. It's heaven. It is the ideal town. It is the reason why everyone wants to live in California. The town is clean and aesthetically pleasing and full of cute little stores and all the street signs have the same pleasant olde worlde font. I mean, I'm pretty sure you have to be absolutely loaded to live here, and I think that's why it's so nice: rich people get to live in the nice places. But never mind, we were just staying in a hostel for a few days, so we could afford to spend time here. Other than that, it's a handy aspirational target.

I came through San Luis Obispo on our spring break Californian road trip with Charlotte and Asha and Hannah. We only drove through town and stopped for gas - and had a surprisingly good time at the gas station, and bonded with a gas station employee named Dino - but it was long enough to make a plan that we would all live there some day, and have really pretty houses, and Charlotte would marry Dino etc. This was enough grounds for me to persuade Kaia that we had to visit on this trip, although she didn't quite realise this favourable impression was based on one brief stop, and when we arrived there she expected me to actually know my way around (an assumption even more false than usual, which is saying something).

I'm pretty pissed we didn't bump into Dino actually, but never mind, it was fun anyway. We stayed in a really cosy hostel stocked with interesting people to talked to, and generally just hung out, relaxed and wandered around. A farmer's market; an indie movie theater (saw Waitress, v.cute); an 'English' pub, The Frog and Peach; extremely organic cafes; shops too designer to set foot in; herons on the beach; pancakes in the hostel. We went along the coast to Morro Bay a couple of times because it was just the most perfect, and generally deserted beach we could find. Gorgeous. Check out Morro rock, too, that was a cool-looking piece of geology:


We went to this coffee shop called Linnaea's a few times, in fact it became a breakfast ritual, and it was just the best coffee shop I had ever been to. It is my new Platonic ideal of coffee shop. Great tea, simple and delicious food, absolutely fantastic prints on the walls, decor like the parlour of the eccentric yet stylish great-aunt you never had. Sitting with Kaia out on the back patio of Linnaea's, drinking tea, reading Zola and having nowhere else to be, was perfect contentment. I miss that place very much.

Generally San Luis Obispo was a nice rest, given the pace that we'd been going, and the miles covered, all the way from Portland to California via New Mexico. I was knackered, and I wasn't even driving.

Aha! Also near San Luis Obispo: The Madonna Inn. No connection to the pop star, apart from an occasional total taste vacancy. The design scheme is a mixture of rococo, big lumps of rock, and pink. Apparently Umberto Eco described it thus: "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." (I don't know who Albert Speer is, but you get the picture. Oh, apparently he was a Nazi architect. Thanks again, Wikipedia.) It has themed rooms and is so ridiculously over-the-top you can't believe it. We couldn't afford to stay, but stopped for tea in the cafe - pink sugar provided. Here is the entranceway, the main restaurant, and one of the ladies' bathrooms. Pink!!