Tour Diary – 27 – Sat 14th May …San Diego… Ken and Barbies home.. Topanga Canyon …
On the way down here to San Diego where we are currently staying until Steve does his talk on Sunday, we passed the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo.
Steve had wanted to stay here but the rooms were so expensive that it was out of the question… Thank Goodness!!
There are over 100 unique rooms each with a ‘wild barrage of fantasy motifs’ given names like ‘Just Heaven and Love Nest.. Honeymoon suites obviously but also the Cave Man rooms complete with fake zebra skins everywhere.
When we arrived it was Mothers Day in America so really busy and the outside looked like Ken and Barbie’s L.A home in the suburbs but worse… I think the best way I could describe it would be for you to imagine a huge pink and white cake from those terrible cake shops where you know that there is not a single real ingredient contained within the said
Steve was so put off that he wouldn’t even go inside to have a little look around so I ventured forth by myself with camera. Inside was a nightmare of “kitsch on mescaline” would probably be the best way to describe it. Probably over a million little fairy lights and all the waitresses for some reason were dressed up as Heidi…. It was so busy with Mums being taken out for dinner on their special day, so it was overwhelming. I got the feeling though that it would be like this every Sunday.
I didn’t get a chance to see in any of the rooms – nor to my great chagrin – into the men’s loos where apparently a waterfall filled up the urinal. Steve wouldn’t go in and take a picture for me, he just wanted to make a quick escape. So not everything is as appealing as the guidebooks would have you believe.
Three more restroom stories.
(I truly believe I might be able to write a book about restrooms when I get home.)
I’m realizing now that when I get back to Steve after having taken a ‘toilet break’ because I am grinning so much with a new story to tell, he has taken to groaning a lot and putting his head down on the table. If he starts to bang it I will have to give up telling him my toilet tales.
Anyway, the first happened in Topanga Canyon, which is so beautiful and is situated just before the huge urban sprawl which is Los Angeles. Topanga is home to over 5,000 old hippies from the 60’s (or so the guide book says – I only saw a few here and there).. and Neil Young recorded After the Gold Rush a favourite album of mine, here in his Topanga home. Woodie Guthrie – Bob Dylan’s musical mentor – used to live here too.
The most interesting building, which was closed so we couldn’t go in unfortunately, was donated by Grandpa of the Walton’s series. It used to be his home but now is a 300-seat open air theatre space called the Theatricum Botanicum. I just love that name, it rolls off the tongue.
It was quite a drive up to get up to the middle of Topanga where the little enclave of people and artistic shops were and was a similar journey to the one we undertook to get past the landslide at Big Sur. Absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. Then when we arrived mid way we found the cutest little enclave of shops and restaurants, which reminded us of Woodstock in Upper New York State. So trendy and buzzing. As we were hoping to try to get past Los Angeles without having to stop (and by this time we were nearing the rush hour of Los Angeles one of the worst road situations in the world)… I said I would just take a quick break and then we could go on. There didn’t appear to be any restrooms in the café we were in and the owner told me that was because they were out the door … along the street … around the back… and to go in I would need this…
A huge tray like the ones you would get 24 hot cross buns on and a key attached. The tray was obviously to stop people from going off with the key but when you come out of the café door with it, I’m sure many people were pointing and sniggering and saying… ‘We know where you’re going!!’.. This was proved to me because when I returned and was going to give the tray + key back to the café owner a woman accosted me and said…”Aha.. so you have it… I will take that please”
How quirky….
So that was toilet story number one.
The next toilet was in another little town on the way and in this case there were only two cubicles. One was normal but the other one was so big that I was completely lost in there. It was at least 3 times the size of my bathroom at home. I took to thinking as I tinkled, (which I often do) of all the things you could do in a toilet of that size and I came up with Me – Steve.. Tom and Candace .. doing a bit of our two–step dancing – of which we are now adepts….complete with our hats. I don’t think we would have bumped into each other. I know it was probably for disabled people in wheelchairs but I think they should have put up a sign saying “Let your Carer know that you might be a long time, as it will take a while to wheel yourself to the back of the toilet”
The 3rd and best, was last nights one in Old Town San Diego in an Italian restaurant reputed to be quite famous. I admired the décor of individual paintings on the wall of the restroom but as I sat down I was gleefully amazed to see that there was a foot stool in the toilet with me ..in the corner.
So of course, there I was trying to work out how to put my feet up on a foot stool whilst doing a tinkle.
I couldn’t do it, not without falling over and so I just wondered who decided that a footstool would be a good idea to put in a Loo?
Steve did laugh a little bit as he was groaning and asked if I find any other wonderful toilet anomalies I just keep them for my diary. Such a spoil sport I’m having such fun with them….
We had totally mis-timed our attempt to get past Los Angeles and did not yet have a hotel booked. This is always a bit stressful. However, Steve discovered the joys of being able to go in the fast lane of traffic because there were two of us in the car. It’s called Car Pooling…. All other cars only have one passenger and have to stay in the traffic-jammed lanes. So in this outside fast lane you just whizz along unobstructed, with no-one cutting you up or jumping in or out and it is the most marvelous way to travel on a motorway and I think it should be introduced into every motorway system. Surely the best effect would be that people would really try to find someone to share their car journeys with them so that they can use this Lane. Instead of it taking us 4 hours we got across in only two and arrived in a gorgeous little beach resort Laguna. Steve, as always, found a fantastic little room overlooking the sea and in the most fragrant of gardens. I was in 7th heaven. As Steve has 3 talks booked for Los Angeles we thought we would do the touristy thing in L.A. on the way back and just get to San Diego and have a nice rest. Steve said that if the car pool sign said you had to have 3 people in the car in order to use it – it would be worth kidnapping someone to put in the car even though they might not be going your way!! Hopefully he was just kidding.
We found a lovely little jewel of a room in Laguna Beach area late at night and had a good rest after such a long day traveling. The view of the bay as always was spectacular as was the gardens, which were so fragrant. But we felt now that we wanted to get down to San Diego where we could stay for 3 days at time as it becomes so tiring packing up and unpacking on a daily basis and also is time consuming for Steve finding the hotels each time.
Again he found such a jewel of a hotel called the Bahia and the grounds are so sumptuous that it reminds me of Bali. As always… wildlife… as we got to our door on the ground floor we were met by two families of ducks wanting food. Each family had around 8 – 10 chicks and I quickly found something to give them. They were so tame that they took it from our hands.
Lots of smuggling then, at breakfast with boxes of cheerios and a few Danish pastries. They obviously knew we would be good at that as they were waiting for us to come back….
The other brilliant thing was a private beach and when Steve and I went on down for a little while we were the only people on it. Could have been because it was quite windy though. Steve was enamored with the pictures of the beach on the Internet, which showed a double-bed situation to lie on and sunbathe with a bit of a ‘Hoody’ going on. How brilliant was that!, a bit of shelter and we got all set up, I was on the wind facing side, but it was bearable whilst the hood was up, but what is it with men that they have to fiddle with contraptions? He immediately put the ‘Hoody’ down as he did not want to get a shadow on his suntanning procedure and I immediately was covered in goose bumps as the cold wind hit me. I made him change sides with me and then as he realised how cold it was he had to re-construct. But just like the proverbial deck chairs it was easy to take down but a bugger to put back up…. I had to walk down to look at the one next to us to see how it was constructed. By the time all that was sorted out… it was time to go in for dinner…. Oh Well!! It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Tomorrow Steve has been asked to appear on the Breakfast TV show, so we will need to be up early in the morning. This will be the first T.V appearance although he has another to do in the Carolinas. Out research hostesses who took us out to dinner last night said that the programme makers were putting on good topics and were very open-minded so it should be worth doing.
Lots of love
Annie
No comments:
Post a Comment