Road Trip 2015 Day 1

Distance – 468.8 miles

Today we started our cross country road trip in a grand way. We started the morning with breakfast with our Granddaughter Sophia and her parents. We went to a little local diner in a converted Carl’s Jr. in Atascadero. Everyone had an omelet of some sort, except Sophia of course. The food was okay and filling but we were all wishing for gluten free pancakes, which they didn’t serve.  We said our good byes and then proceeded to drove back and forth between Paso Robles and Templeton running last minute errands. This meant that we left about 2.5 hours later than we meant to. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise for us as our first stop was in San Carlos for a meal at the Refuge.

The Refuge is well known for their pastrami and according to Guy Fieri and Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives has some of the best pastrami on the west coast. With Helen’s love of Pastrami, it only made sense that we make that our first stop on our cross country adventure. So we pulled into San Carlos and following the Directions to 963 Laurel Street we found a parking spot right in front of the door and the CLOSED sign. Uh-oh; it was time to whip out the phone and do some fast checking. I couldn’t believe that we would drive all that way and added an hour and half extra to our drive, just to see a closed sign. At least there would be one thing making us feel better, all the other people walking up and shaking the handle trying to get in.

Fortunately it turned out that they close everyday between lunch and dinner service, so all we had to do was pass the time for 45 minutes and we would be home free. So we chose to wander down Laurel Street and we were glad we did, the street is packed with little restaurants serving all sorts of cuisine. From Japan to Italy, to Burma we found lots of options. And no dining district would be complete without the ubiquitous Starbucks nearby. The other good news was that if you weren’t hungry you could slip in to one of the many nail salons for a quick mani/pedi.

While I just barley managed to not give in to a manicure we headed back to the Refuge and after 2 minutes we were seated. We grabbed an outdoor table and ordered. Helen went straight for the Pastrami sandwich, I first needed to check out the gluten free options, which boiled down to “you can order the sandwiches without the bread” So instead I went with the Pastrami Chef Salad and it was pretty dang good, The pastrami is definitely worth the effort to get here. The other nice thing about the place is the beer selection, for normal folks that is, for me it was Bards beer or a cider. Not too interesting. But for beer drinkers they have a selection of Belgian Beers that are really good and if it wasn’t for this darn celiac, I would have ordered a large Kwaks from Belgian “<cough>small Kwaks please<cough>” Which are served in one of the coolest beer glasses ever. .

After dinner we climbed back into the Mustang and drove the 4 hours to get to Red Bluff where we are spending the night. After we fill out all the paperwork that our loan officer tells us we need to get done so we have a home to someday come back to.

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