The Great West Coast Road Trip: Day 7 - Paso Robles/Pismo Beach

The morning was a bust.  I had to work on a few transactions and coordinate estimates from a different time zone.  John was OK with that; he just watched some more Battlestar Galactica from his iPad.  After wrapping up, I was running on pure stress.  Good thing we happened to be in a town famous for its wineries!  

Chris and Tom, whom we stayed with in San Jose, got married in Paso Robles a couple years ago at Pear Valley Vineyard.  So we retuned to this little piece of Tuscany in the middle of California for a wine tasting.

The sommelier was very generous and gave us samples from more bottles than we were supposed to have.  I bought a bottle of white, and also a glass to drink away the stress, which she filled nearly 3/4 full (yes, I finished it all)!

Wine tasting

Relaxing on the Pear Valley property

One Tree Hill

We met a nice couple while there, and before they left, they drove up the hill to give us another bottle of wine for our trip!

Enjoying the view

After Paso Robles, we didn't have a plan.  No hotels booked for another couple of nights; we were winging it.  We ended up making a pit stop in Pismo Beach to ride ATVs in the 8 miles of sand dunes. The buggy place made us watch a video prior to giving us the keys, and it showed all sorts of things that could go wrong.  The girl who worked there casually mentioned that someone had even died a few weeks ago.  John had no problem with this, since he grew up riding 4-wheelers and dirt bikes, but I had never been on one.  I almost chickened out, but didn't want to ruin John's fun.

The coast was cold and very windy, so we bundled up and went out to the dunes.  Upon arriving, we were told that we'd have to wait because MTV was there filming rapper, Mac Miller.  He ended up losing his cell phone somewhere in the dunes and he had to go back and find it (he never did).  You have to squint because it's not very apparent in this picture, but you can kind of sort of see the crew to the right of the sign.  We weren't allowed to take pictures, but I snuck this one in.

That's me, in the pink goggles, on an ATV!

John in the yellow helmet.

I was so nervous at first, going extremely slow and stopping a bunch.  But by the end, I was going full speed and zipping up and down hills.  The dunes looked so vast and empty, like the Sahara desert.

Here's John tackling a big dune.  It was steeper in person, and after a while, I even worked up the courage to go up, too.

After our fun outing, we got back in the car and made our way towards L.A.  We passed through the cute little town of Solvang, a Danish town in the Santa Ynez Valley famous for it's wineries and spas.  Part of the movie Sideways was filmed here.  We would have stayed a little longer, but the sun was setting and everything was closed for the day.  

We spent the night in Santa Barbara.  We had spent a few days there on a previous trip, so we mainly just ate and enjoyed the hot tub at the hotel.