West Coast Adventure {Day 5}

Day 5 – San Francisco, CA | Davenport, CA | Salinas, CA

The morning of day 5 we were exhausted… from all the wine the day before, I’m sure. We still managed to roll ourselves out of bed and have breakfast at our hotel before we said “au revoir” to wine country. It was a hard goodbye, but we put on a brave face and soldiered on. There was much more adventure to be had.

This was the day that ruined driving for me. I honestly think that had this day not been like it was, traffic-wise, I would’ve been a lot less impatient driving for the rest of the trip. This was the day we got stuck in traffic like it was going out of style. But, that’s to be expected when you start the day in San Francisco.

After tons of traffic I won’t bore you by writing about, we somehow managed to find a prime parking spot by Alamo Square in San Francisco. We were only passing through the city to see the Painted Ladies, AKA those townhouses in the opening sequence of Full House.

Happy to get away from SF and all it’s messy traffic, we headed back to the coastline to continue our drive south. That’s when we got stuck in road construction. Boo. We eventually made it to our second stop of the day, the Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport. I saw this place online before the trip and thought it was too cute a place not to stop at. I would’ve loved to pick our own strawberries, but the chocolate covered strawberries were tempting us so we got those instead. They were DELISH. We also did a little jam tasting.

And just when we thought we were out of the metaphorical traffic woods, we tried driving to Monterey, CA. MISTAKE. Traffic was BUMPER TO BUMPER. I couldn’t park anywhere, I almost got hit by other cars multiple times, and I just wanted to be out of there. So we typed our hotel we would be staying at that night into the GPS and got ourselves the heck out of dodge. Very slowly though. We were in traffic for hours. Turns out there was a terrible accident near there that had all of the roads completely backed up. #roadtripfail

We were so hungry after all the traffic was said and done. I knew I wanted to go to In-N-Out because it’s very California, but I was not about to go any direction but toward our hotel to get there. Miraculously we were passing through Salinas, CA which has an In-N-Out! We headed straight for it, and got detoured by another accident. By the time we made it to In-N-Out and were able to get out of the car, I was so excited I wanted to do dancing laps around the building. I settled for walking in and ordering dinner.

I officially LOVE In-N-Out! We each ordered a cheeseburger and animal fries. SO GOOD! Come on Washington, get on it and get one of these!

After dinner we continued the drive to our hotel in Atascadero, CA – what I liked to call, a “layover” hotel. Just a place to sleep as we continued on our trek. Thankfully we didn’t encounter any more traffic on the way, just a lovely sunset. After we checked in, we took the opportunity to clean out our car and cracked open a hard cider. Much deserved after the ~~traffic~~ day we’d had. Sleep came quick for us that night.