Welcome to Beautiful California

After our stop-over in L.A. we were really ready to get to the end of the trip and be moved into our own place. On Saturday, 7 June we left the L.A. area and headed west and north to our final destination in a place called Pismo Beach. The trip was just over 200 miles. It was not a hard drive.
This is sparse, rough country. These huge hills and small mountains push close up on the coast collect all the sea mist. They are covered in short, scrubby plants with brown and dark green colours. The ocean alternates from bright blue and grey. It’s beautiful county. Some of our favorite landscape yet. There are cow pastures and vineyards everywhere with giant jumbles of rounded rock sticking through. Wineries are only a stone’s throw apart. On top of all this wild land and rural use is a luxury vacation veneer. This is the place where the masses from L. A. and San Francisco come for vacation. Everything around here is a jumble of small-town America, world-class accommodations, colonial Spain, and utter wilderness.

The only challenge of the trip was actually getting into the apartment when we finally got there after 2405.2 miles. We knew that the property was a vacation rental condo. We assumed that there would be an office in one of the rooms of attached like most apartment complexes. Once we were here however, we found no such office. When Maya called to found out where the office was we it turned out it was a couple exits back down the highway. So we had to get back on the road and drive into the down town area of Pismo Beach to found this little house-converted-to-an-office where we could get our keys. This is all with the huge trailer still attached to the car! *Matt makes grumbling noises*

We did manage to get our keys and get moved in. Unfortunately, it’s a fully furnished place – furnished with stuff we don’t particularly like. For starters, there is no place to even put all our boxes because all the space is full of furniture and hideous (to our eyes) decorations. There are cheap kitchen utensils in all the drawers, mismatched towels in the Lenin closet, and sheets on the bed that are a little too worn for our tastes. Worst of all is that the predominate colour in the place is beige. The cabinets, sinks, table, chairs, wall paper and even the fridge are all beige. The floors in the kitchen and bathroom are marble tiles – as are the kitchen countertops. That is a nice feature, but they match the colour scheme of the rest of the condo with cream/white/brown swirls on the floor and black/grey/beige flecks on the counters! After hoping to get settled into our own place there is this oppressive feeling of still being squatters in someone else’s home. That is essentially what’s going on as someone owns this condo and has let the rental company use it. There’s even a greeting in a little frame on the counter from the real owners telling us they hope we enjoy our time here as much as they have over the years. After coming so far it’s hard to not yet feel at home. At least there is a lot of stuff in the area to do…