Well it is the last full day of this great adventure. This morning I went into SLO to pick up a few last minute things as to send a couple of packages home. For years Doug has wanted to have lunch at the SLO fish house so that's where we went.We love this area so much that we wanted to explore a bit more in hopes of finding that perfect town with the perfect home as an affordable price (OK stop laughing). En route to Santa Maria we got off Hwy. 101 at Shell Beach Rd. which we found out is the northern Pismo Beach "suburbs" with ocean front gazillion dollar homes. I would be honored to live in the garage and even then would have trouble figuring out how to fill it up!
Here is a view from the bluffs walk looking north towards Avila Beach.
Here I have turned around 180 degrees and am looking towards the resort portion of Pismo Beach and the famous Oceano Dunes (off in the distance to the right. The dunes are 18 miles long. For you old movie buffs this is where they filmed the Ten Commandments. At the conclusion of filming the dismantled the sets and buried them in the sand so they could not be reused. Today they are located in a restricted conservation zones but every once in a while someone unearths a treasure or two. I found a treasure of my own...a complete sand dollar! Something that I had always hoped to find. OK, check that off the list.
This is a mustard plant. Legend has it that the friars tossed the seeds as they migrated along the El Camino Real trail so that they could find there way. They are beautiful and grow wild all along the roadways. For those of you who liked history I have included information about El Camino Real at the end of the post.
I am a sucker for the ocean and I loved standing listening to the surf.
Doug and I are going to the concert at the San Luis Obispo Mission tonight. If I get any decent photos I will post them, otherwise this is the end of the road my friends. It's been an incredible journey and I am delighted that you were along for the ride.
El Camino Real (Spanish for The Royal Road, also known as The King's Highway) and sometimes associated with Calle Real usually refers to the 600-mile (966-kilometer) California Mission Trail, connecting the former Alta California's 21 missions (along with a number of support sites), 4 presidios, and several pueblos, stretching from Mission San Diego de Alcalá in San Diego in the south to Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma in the north.
In fact, any road under the direct jurisdiction of the Spanish crown and its viceroys was a "camino real." Examples of such roads ran between principal settlements throughout Spain and its colonies such as New Spain. Most caminos reales had names apart from the appended "camino real". Once Mexico won its independence from Spain, no road in Mexico, including California, was a camino real. The name was rarely used after that and was only revived in the American period in connection with the boosterism associated with the Mission Revival movement of the early 20th century.
The route originated in Baja California Sur, Mexico, at the site of Misión San Bruno in San Bruno (the first mission established in Las Californias), though it was only maintained as far south as Loreto.
Between 1683 and 1834, Spanish missionaries established a series of religious outposts throughout the present-day U.S. State of California and the present-day Mexican states of Baja California and Baja California Sur. To facilitate overland travel, mission settlements were approximately 30 miles (48 kilometers) apart, so that they were separated by one long day's ride on horseback along the 600-mile (966-kilometer) long El Camino Real (Spanish for "The Royal Highway," though often referred to in the later embellished English translation, "The King's Highway"), and also known as the California Mission Trail. Heavy freight movement was practical only via water. Tradition has it that the padres sprinkled mustard seeds along the trail in order to mark it with bright yellow flowers.
In 1912, the State of California began paving a section of the historic route in San Mateo County. Construction of a two-lane concrete highway began in front of the historic Uncle Tom's Cabin, an inn in San Bruno that was built in 1849 and demolished exactly 100 years later. There was little traffic initially and children used the pavement for roller skating until traffic increased. By the late 1920s, the State of California began the first of numerous widening projects of what later became part of U.S. Route 101. Today the route through San Mateo and Santa Clara counties is designated as State Route 82.[1]
An unpaved portion of the original Spanish road has been preserved just east of Mission San Juan Bautista in San Juan Bautista, California.
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