Hearst Castle, Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo

We continued our Pacific Coast Highway road trip down south and visited the Hearst Castle on Tue Jul 21. We got there around 10am and joined their "Experience Tour." Our guide was very knowledgeable and funny, making the tour very interesting. The mansion was built by Architect Julia Morgan (who is the 1st woman architect to graduate from famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts school in Paris) for newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Hearst started and ran the San Francisco Examiner. The mansion, like many other mansions, was huge and elaborate. Tons of space, rooms, expensive materials, guests houses, etc. The most famous part of the Hearst Castle is the Neptune Pool. The pool itself was expanded 3 times to accommodate the growing size of the family.

The Hearst Foundation donated this mansion to the California State Parks. It's a pretty nice place to visit. Apparently, there are 3 other tours that one can take to see more parts of the mansion. One good method to keep the visitors returning and earning some $$. Yeah, CA definitely needs the extra dough.

After Hearst Castle, we stopped by Cambria for lunch. Cambria is a very small town - so small that Main Street is literally the main street. We ate a restaurant called Robin's - I had a good roasted veggie sandwich, though SQ's fish tacos weren't that impressive.

We travelled further south to Morro Bay. This was a fishing community (at least it used to be) but now, the waterfront is just a tourist attraction. Think a rundown, much smaller version of Fishermen's Wharf, filled with little shops and restaurants. The Morro Rock is connected to the wharf which is kinda interesting. We drove along a narrow street and then we ended up on Morro Rock itself. Morro Rock is a 176m high volanic plug. Everything was so beautiful here EXCEPT for those 3 ugly stacks (right of picture). It is part of a Power plant. Yes, an energy power plant. How disgusting to have a power plant right in the waterfront. Gross. All the beauty of the wharf, the Morro Bay, the surrounding beaches just got ruined! Sad.

After Morro Bay, the drive took us to San Luis Obispo. I never knew how small SLO is - it's quite like Davis, a small college town. We drove around Cal Poly to look at the buildings and the campus itself. I didn't feel like it was a big campus at all...kinda reminds me a bit of SFSU. SQ's faint memory has it that Pismo beach was nearby. So we drove and drove - little did we know that Pismo Beach was actually 12 miles away from SLO! But it was worth the visit ~ Pismo Beach is beautiful! White sand beaches and clear blue waters. What was especially nice was that they had a pier that took us all the way out to the waters. In this pic, we are staning on the pier - that explains why we have the beach on our left.

We enjoyed a nice Japanese bento box dinner at Gosh-i. The meal included a choice of meat (chicken, beef, or salmon), rice, tempura, miso soup, California roll, mixed green salad, a seaweed cucumber salad, fruit cocktail, AND watermelon. All for a grand total of $17!!! What a steal!! No wonder this place got so many good Yelp reviews!!