13 Hours Down the California Coast

This past weekend I was up in beautiful Silicon Valley for a birthday celebration. It was such a wonderful good time, not to mention the delicious deep-fried turkey that was procured for the festivities.

As we were packing up to get back to Los Angeles, we decided to look online and find some roadside attractions to stop by; after about an hour and a half of searching, we had mapped out a ridiculous detour along the entire coast of the Golden State. Here, courtesy of Flickr are the highlights.


First stop, the world's largest outdoor monopoly board. OK, I've got a couple questions, actually one's a statement: 1.) We were expecting this to be a bit bigger as it was surprisingly hard to find and 2.) Who wants to play a long, boring game of Monopoly outside for 12 hours? This is just such a bad idea.



Next stop, the world's largest Artichoke in Castroville, CA. Inside is an artichoke restaurant-

Clockwise from Left: Fried Artichoke, Artichoke Soup, and Steamed Artichoke. (Not shown because we didn't order it: gross Artichoke Bread.)


Keepin' on down the coast, we come to Monterey, California, a gorgeous seaside town. I would love to spend a springtime up here someday. Meanwhile, across from the cemetery, is the Dennis the Menace park with this laughably small statue of Dennis the Menace. The park itself (not shown) is pretty awesome- there's an actual old train engine you can climb on, a crazy suspension bridge, a ROCK WALL for kids to climb on, and a hedge maze(!!!). Meanwhile, no kids want to play at the park because they've been scared to death by this:

A lion's head water fountain.

Moving on, we then had a two hour drive along the gorgeous Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur national park.

We only stopped once because we were racing against the darkness and the fog, both of which engulfed us with sixty some odd miles to go before we reached civilization. This picture was taken right at sunset on an outlook over a sea of clouds. Pretty awesome.

So we powered through so we could get to Morro Bay, where Central California's Largest Outdoor Chessboard is:

LAAAAAAMMMMEEEEE.*



The award for grossest roadside attraction (in San Luis Obeezbo) is Bubblegum Alley, which is exactly what it looks like.



Nooooooo!!!! The Madonna Inn's coffee shop was closed- probably because it was eleven o'clock at night on a Monday in January. I imagine if we had stopped to get coffee and a pastry, we would not have kept going to the last two stops on our little trip. Which may not have been a bad thing…


The picture didn't come out, which is just as well, the website said that there were Front Yard Dinosaur statues which sounded awesome, but after being on the road for twelve hours, a seven foot, wicker, tyrannosaurus rex just doesn't impress.


Annnddd finally, the stupid Pismo Beach, giant stupid clamshells, disguised as stupid butterfly wings.

And that's it- then we went home.

Holy shit- that was so much fun.




*Just how lame could this possibly be? It costs $29 PER PERSON to play on the stupid giant chessboard, which I could build in a parking lot in a weekend. Boooo…Morro Bay is filled with criminals and people with bad taste.