On the Road to Frisco

By Gemma Castle on Jul 22, 09 01:53 PM

"After saying our goodbye's to Scarlett, Sarah and I headed on our way to San Luis Obispo. This is about a 3 hour drive from Hollywood and is part way between Hollywood and San Francisco. The drive also takes you on the Pacific Coast Highway, one of the main reasons Sarah and I wanted to hire a car for this leg of the trip. There are some stunning viewing points.

We were staying at the San Luis Bay Inn; the third and final of the timeshare hotels Sarah's parents booked for us.
It was pretty late when we left Hollywood, and after three and a half hours of driving on a slight hangover, we were both shattered by the time we arrived at the hotel. We checked into our lovely apartment, ordered take away and settled in front of the TV for the night.
San Luis Obispo is a very quiet place and with no car it would be almost impossible to get around. We were booked into the hotel for just four nights in order for us to break our drive to San Francisco up a little bit.

We spent most of the few days doing a spot of sunbathing by the pool, and getting much needed hair cuts! After the disaster haircut I got in Australia I was very dubious, but as it so desperately needed doing I had no choice! I opted for just a trim as I thought it would be impossible for her to go wrong, and to be fair, she wasn,t too bad..... I didn't leave the salon with tears in my eyes, unlike in Australia!

When we were in Newport Harbour, staying with Jay, we met his room mate Bryan and his girlfriend Bianca. They both now live in San Luis Obispo so they invited us round for dinner one evening, which was nice. We just had chicken and salad but it was delicious and so nice to have some home cooked food!

After four quiet nights there we set off on our way to San Francisco. Bryan had informed us that the route we had taken from Hollywood wasn't actually the official Pacific Coast Highway, which we didn't realise, we had just been following the GPS! Anyway, he gave us the right directions and although it added another couple of hours on our trip to San Francisco it was definitely worth it.

We took it steady and stopped off at a few different places, including Ragged Point, and a nice little spot where we got amazing views of Elephant Seals.
Six and a half hours later we arrived in San Francisco just in time to drop the car off at 4pm, although it did take us half an hour to find the car park! We walked back to our hostel, and didn't realise how much of a work out it would be! The hills in that city are practically vertical!