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Camping in SLO Several things have happened lately that I meant to blog about, but never actually got around to doing. I went to see Matchbox 20 in concert. Went to see Reel Big Fish in concert. Booked my flight to London. And several other things that I can't think of right now.. Realizing that I've been slacking I decided that I should probably whip something out about my camping trip this weekend while it is still fresh in my mind. This trip was origionally planned by Ben and his roommates. The plan was to go to the Dunes in Oceano near San Luis Obispo. More specifically, the plan was to go friday night. At least I thought it was. Around Wednesday I hear from Ben that he isn't going to go until Saturday. I complain that a 5 or 6 hour drive for one night seems silly, but apparently there is a Baseball game or something that is more important. "It's okay though," says Ben, "We're going to arrive by 10:30 or 11:00am on Saturday". So, I call everyone I was going to take and we decide to leave at 6am. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a morning person and as such, this is quite a sacrifice for me. We get on the road and head south. After several hours of driving and playing catch phrase we see some signs for San Luis Obispo. It's nearly 11:00, so we decide that we should give Ben a call and see where he is so we can meet up. "You're coming?" Ben asks. "I told everyone that you weren't going to". After explaining that me wanting to come early didn't mean that I wasn't going to come at all, we finally get around to asking Ben where he is. "Oh, we got stuck in some traffic... we're probably about an hour away." "Where are you?" "Santa Monica" ...Santa Monica is about 200 miles south of San Luis Obispo. We knew Ben would never make it there in an hour. Probably not in 3. As a result we decided to continue driving north to the small Danish town of Solvang.  It was fairly quaint in a touristy way, but not particularly amazing. I did like the architecture a lot though. We spend 2 or 3 hours here (most of it in a bar) before getting a call from Ben letting us know that he was run off the road by a big rig (i.e. he was playing chicken and lost). We decided to drive back to San Luis Obispo and arrived back around 4:00pm. We called Ben’s roommate Joey who came to pick us up in his four wheel drive and take us out to the beach.  We setup our tent and started a fire. The rest of that night consisted mainly of cooking food and drinking. Surprisingly, I slept fairly well. Although I did wake up a few times during the night, I was able to get back to sleep without much of an issue and it was nearly 7:30 before I was up for good. We had some breakfast and then went on to the main activity of the day, and my main reason for coming at all- ATVs!  Our group getting ready to go out  Me in front of our tent  Me on the dunes Yup, that's me doing a jump. It looks somewhat unimpressive here, but I actually gained a good few feet on some of these. Between this, racing, and spinning doughnuts everyone had a great time out on the dunes. Sadly, after a couple hours our time was up. We returned the ATVs and headed back to our campsite where we packed up and got shuttled back to our car. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant that consisted of a couple converted train cars. After lunch, we said our goodbyes and started the drive home, stopping only briefly to walk around the historic San Miguel Mission.  After that it was a simple and rather uneventful 5 hour drive back to Santa Rosa. 1 Comments |
