The Great American West Trip - Day Three

Waking up in Folsom, CA is never very exciting, mostly because the only thing to look forward to is visiting the local prison. This was definitely one of those purpose driven visits, and the purpose of this stop was to take Tiffany to work at the Folsom Intel campus. So I woke up and drove Tiffany to work like a proper domestic partner would, and I went back to sleep while she brought home the bacon. She only had a three hour meeting, so by noon, it was time for us to get back on the road again. Now we had some extremely lofty ideas of driving to LA by the time the sunset, but we also had the lofty idea of driving the pacific coast highway the whole way down. So it took us a good two hours to reach the coast and find highway 1, but once we did, we were treated to the famous views that countless people have experienced since the 1 was created. The only problem was that we were making MINIMAL progress towards reaching our destination. I remember getting on the one at around 2pm and seeing that LA was about 350 miles away, I figured we would see as much of the coast as possible, and then we would get in to LA around 7pm. Here is a lesson that someone should have told us: driving the coast (as in hwy 1 not hwy 101) takes about five times longer than driving any other way. We would drive for 20 spectacular minutes, and two miles of progress would have been made towards our mile countdown. The road is that windy and that slow, that you must drive at 20 to 30mph the entire time. It was beautiful getting to watch the sunset while driving, but once the daylight disappeared, the one turned from amazing to treacherous. After realizing that we were about 60 miles from a real highway over mountain roads, and seeing a car drive off the road (on the inside, not the seaside), we decided that we were going to have to stop for the night. So we picked our destination to be Santa Maria, and counted down the miles to safety.
The one good thing about stopping in Santa Maria, was that we were finally able to get In and Out Burger. Tiffany had been talking about these burgers since we entered California, and we finally came across one when we happened to be hungry. So we decided to take a break and stop for a quick meal. While we were eating, I called my mom and asked her to look into some cheap hotels for us, and she was more than grateful to help. When it was time for us to pick up our food, we witnessed a very amusing interaction between the store manager and one customer. There was a father there with his daughter, and he began explaining to the manager that he ordered a double burger, and yet he only saw one patty. So the store manager takes the burger with her BARE hand, places it on the counter, and starts pawing through the cheese, lettuce and tomato, to point out to the father that there was indeed a second patty. With her hand still knuckle deep in the sandwich, she explained that sometimes the patty slides to the back while they are being wrapped. Thinking to myself that now she just ruined a perfectly good burger to prove a point, I assumed the story was over. But the manager, says, let me take this in the back and re-wrap it. I looked at the father and then at the manager, and didn’t know whether to be more shocked at the fathers acceptance of this proposal or of the managers bold assertion that the burger was alright. I guess people in Cali are just more laid back. So back to the point, we had some food (not as good as expected) and started looking for the next place to go. Since it was only like 9pm we wanted to go see a movie or at least find a bar to hang out at. Finding out that Borat was not being played anywhere in Santa Maria and that there were no real bars around, we tried to find a liquor store and some cheap hotels. All the hotels were lookin real shady, I’m talking hotel attendant coming to the door with no shirt kind of shady. So we decided to check in to good ole Motel 6 and call it a night.
I had bought a bottle of wine from the liquor store, and bought a 99 cent bottle opener as well, so when I got in I decided to open my bottle of wine and relax. To my surprise my 99 cent bottle opener decided to behave like it was a cheap wine bottle opener, the darn thing broke the second I tried to yank the cork out. So now I was stuck with the age old problem of a wine bottle with no way to open it. The next twenty minutes were dedicated to busting this thing open without getting soaked in wine, and I ended up utilizing a ballpoint pen, beer bottle opener, and some good ole muscle power to pop it open. So drinking and talking took us into the night, all in all a good day.