Central Coastin’ – Day 1

A few months ago, we saw a really great deal come through in an email from Travelzoo.com for a hotel voucher in Avila Beach, California.  Avila Beach is roughly four hours north of where we are on what the folks there like to call the “Central Coast.”  We’ve visited Avila before, and we liked its quiet ambiance and close proximity to other things in the area, like the coastline and the great vineyards in Paso Robles.  When we found out that the voucher would work for the time period in May when the Amgen Tour of California (arguably our biggest bicycle event in the US) raced through, we were in and booked our stay without further ado!

Thus, early last week found us packing up the truck (while the electric car is great, we didn’t want to have to stop and wait for it to charge every 85 miles on a four hour trip) and heading out of the greater LA metro area.  When you’re working on getting out of LA in that direction, you have several routes to take, but once you get to the coast, you pretty much have two: US 1, which runs along the coast through Malibu, or the 101, which runs through the towns of Camarillo and Calabasas.  The Santa Monica Mountains are in the way between them, and there aren’t many routes to get around them (or over them!) other than these two.  While the 101 is faster, we decided to go the much more scenic route, and we hopped on the 1. 

Since it was vacation time and we got our hotel in Avila for a steal, we decided to splurge on lunch and hit up Nobu in Malibu on the way out of town.  As always, we were up and ready to go before we needed to be (perpetual earlybirds), and since we had the first lunch reservation of the day at Nobu, we needed to figure out something to do to kill some time.  Since Chris had never been to the Santa Monica Pier, and it was conveniently right on the way, we headed out with our interim destination in mind.  Most folks have seen shots of the Pier on tv or in the movies, and it’s a pretty iconic spot.  We wandered around for a while, seeing the sights and watching tourists buy stupid crap, until it was time to head further up the coast.

Not too shabby, right?

Me with the famous Ferris Wheel.

Also, Thumb!

A lovely panoramic from the pier

All the important things...

Artsy trash can photo.

The Ferris Wheel with

the roller coaster

The drive to Nobu didn’t take very long (another 15 minutes or so), and we ended up there early anyway, waiting just a bit longer for the doors to open.  We didn’t mind; although it was on the windy side, being right on the coast, it was a lovely, sunny day, and we chilled in the outside lounge area until they were ready to take us to our table.  Lunch was delicious – Nobu is known for its fresh seafood and sushi preparations, and everything we ate was outstanding.  As you can see from the photos, the scenery is also seriously amazing; we had a table right along the rail looking over the ocean, and the waves were crashing to the shore directly underneath us.

Time for lunch!

We started out with yellowtail sashimi with jalapeno, then moved onto a piece of Japanese snapper nigiri each.  We also each had a crispy rice with spicy tuna bite, wrapped in a lettuce cup.  For our main, we split the black cod with miso glaze, which fell apart with every bite.  At this point, we’d had a lot of amazing food, but all of it was rather light, so we finished up with the Malibu “takumi” burgers, sliders of kobe-style beef served with a small cup of sweet potato fries.  Seriously, everything was outstanding; although it’s expensive, the food is amazing, and the views are out of this world.  People watching was also super fun – we saw tons of folks dressed to impress, including one girl wearing that Versace (or whatever) tiger jacket that John Oliver was making fun of on Last Week Tonight a few months ago.

I mean, really.

Me with the green tea.

I had about 8 cups of this

because I was cold.

The waiter said,

"drink up!  It's the only free thing here!"

After we headed out of Nobu, feeling happy and full, we made our way up the coast on the 1, eventually joining back with the 101 itself and traveling through Oxnard, Ventura, and Santa Barbara.  Our next stop was about two hours away from lunch, in the city of Buellton at the Firestone Walker Barrelworks facility.  Firestone Walker is a great brewery headquartered up the road in Paso Robles, and we absolutely love their barrel-aged specialties, including one of my favorites of all time, the Velvet Merkin (don’t Google that on your work computer, cool?).  The Barrelworks facility is dedicated to wild and sour ales, and although these aren’t my favorites, they’ve been growing on me in recent years (Chris loves them and has for a while).  If you ever talk to brewers who do both wild and traditional ales, they can tell you that wild ales, being fermented with wild yeasts, tend to take over the rest of the brewing space; one of our other favorite breweries (only a few miles from where we now live) had a major issue with contamination of its standard beer lines by wild yeast a few years back, making everything taste sort of funky and sour (good for wild ales, not good for traditional stouts).  The easiest way to solve this issue is to build more than one facility and cordon your wild ales off, away from everything else.  Firestone Walker has taken this to an extreme, one could say, since their Barrelworks location is a full two hours away from their flagship brewery.

Noms!

Anywhoo, it was time to head inside and taste some offerings!  Although wild ales are the order of the day here, they also had a few barrel aged items on offer, so we grabbed some samples of each.  We enjoyed almost everything; Firestone Walker is just a really solid brewery, so it’s hard to go wrong with anything from there.  After making a few purchases (some of their current year special editions – most of them age really well – and some t-shirts), it was back in the truck for the final push to Avila.

The namesake barrels

With our haul.

Our lodging for the next two evenings, the Avila Village Inn, was another hour up the 101, and we enjoyed passing through some of the other places we’d stayed on the Central Coast (we’ve stayed in Pismo Beach once and Shell Beach once) as we traveled north.  We pulled into the parking lot at the Inn right around 5pm, and we easily checked into our room.  Our vouchers included a free bottle of wine (score!), and our room itself featured a California king bed (which Chris always appreciates), a huge bathroom, a gas fireplace, and the use of the private hot tub on our room’s balcony.  Since the weather would only top out at 65 or so while we there, many of these amenities were grateful enjoyed.

Our Inn, but not my picture.

Thanks, Internets!

We chilled out in the room for a little while (Chris surfed the tv channels while I checked into the class I was facilitating), and then it was time to get dressed and call an Uber to head to dinner at Lido, the restaurant in the Dolphin Bay resort in nearby Shell Beach.  While in the Uber, the gentleman driving gave us an update on the stage of the Tour that day (we’d missed the coverage while we were traveling), including a horrific crash by Toms Skujins.  Feel free to Google that, but beware – it involves a severe concussion and a collarbone, broken in 5 places.  Thankfully, Toms was eventually okay, but if you Google the crash, then be sure to also Google his x-rays to see the crazy piece of metal that now resides in his shoulder.  As someone who separated his shoulder in the past on a similar (but thankfully, much more minor) crash, Chris was wincing harder than I was at this news.

The aftermath.

Yes, he's back on his bike.

His team car eventually convinced

him that this was not a good idea,
and he abandoned the race.

Anyway, dinner at the Lido was good.  We opted for the tasting menu with wine pairings, as it was a pretty cheap option as these things go.  While the Lido is one of the fine dining options in the area, the Central Coast is not known for haute cuisine, and some courses were better than others.  Coincidentally enough, we’d actually eaten in the Lido once before, when we stayed in The Cliffs Resort next door around 8 years earlier.  At the time, we were living in Casa Grande, and Chris was doing an internship with Dreyer’s Ice Cream (Edy’s, for my east coast readers) in Bakersfield; I’d flown into Bako, and we headed to Shell Beach for a weekend retreat.  As it happened, a few days before the trip, Chris was out mountain biking with some new friends, and he sustained the very shoulder injury mentioned above.  By the point we ate at the Lido, he was in a sling and on some very strong pain medications, so I remember that dinner more clearly than he does.

While we were eating dinner, we were seated next to a large room in the restaurant that was cordoned off by temporary walls, and we could see a number of folks moving around in it and watching a large screen.  We speculated that one of the teams in the Tour was likely staying in the Dolphin Bay and was having their nightly team meeting in the room next to us; the start for the next day’s stage was nearby Pismo Beach, and we’d seen the Lotto NL-Jumbo team equipment van in the parking lot next door when we Uber’d past, so it was pretty likely.  However, we were never able to confirm our suspicions, and we resolved to just enjoy the rest of dinner.

After dinner, we Uber’d back to our hotel (with kind of a nutso, easily distracted driver – at least he was nice) and relaxed in the hot tub for a little while before crashing out in bed.  The next morning would see us out and about at a decently early hour, and we were ready for some shuteye!

Later!

Amy