San Lois Obispo

I'd picked out San Lois Obispo as a pretty much random stop south of Hearst Castle, as the San Simeon hotel strip looked pretty awful. Here's what we found:

We stayed at the Hampton Inn just out of town. I've stayed at numerous Hampton Inn's and found the vast majority of them to be clean, modern, and reasonably priced - pretty much all you could want. This one was no exception, and the girls thought it was the best hotel they stayed in on our trip.

Unfortunately we arrived on a Friday, so we missed the Thursday night Farmer's Market which is supposed to be excellent. Instead we had dinner at the nearby Applebee's, where we were served by a student from Cal Poly - an almost guaranteed experience in this town. Our middle daughter was excited to see there was a large Forever 21 (her favourite shop) next door, and we had to pay it a visit after dinner. It was one of the biggest single floor spaces of clothing I've ever seen - when you entered you could barely make out the other side.

The next morning, we packed up and headed off to climb Bishop's Peak... well, not really... but if we had our hiking boots, that's what we'd do, as its supposed to be a spectacular view from the top.

Instead we headed into town, which is pretty and has plenty of signs of being the college town that it is: lots of restaurants and bars. We were headed to see the only "tourist attraction" we could find in San Lois Obispo: Bubble Gum Alley. This is a small alley way, maybe 6 feet wide, that is absolutely plastered from ground level to at least 10 or 12 feet off the ground, with discarded bubble gum. Apparently the town tried to clean it off once or twice, but it quickly returned and they have long since given up.

Its disgusting! ... vile!  ... and completely distasteful!

But we couldn't resist going and taking a look. And worst still our middle daughter insisted on adding to it...