San Louis Obispo, CA

We drove up to Santa Margarita Lake today to see a park and passed through San Louis Obispo where they were holding a marathon.  We passed the finish line well into the race probably seeing the folks toward the back of the pack reaching it.  The marathon ended at the Madonna Inn (a famously eccentric inn established here in 1958.)  Seeing the last of the runners slowly achieve the finish brings back memories of when I ran the Boston Marathon years ago.  For those of us finishing with the later group of runners, “just finishing” was the goal but we were proud nevertheless.

The large university “California Polytechnic at San Louis Obispo” is located here.  Also known by its initials of SLO, the city is also another downtown that has incorporated “the mall” into its central core of streets keeping the city vibrant.  As one of the oldest communities in California, there are architecturally interesting, original buildings mixed in with newer structures giving the town character.  We passed one building called the Ah Louis Store, which is the last vestige of what was once a Chinatown in the city.  There is an alley here called “Bubblegum Alley” where people have been sticking their chewed gum since 1960!  (I did not walk down the alley nor photograph it-maybe next trip!)  The Fremont Theater is a prominent structure here and still operates as a movie theater showing first runs on its huge screen within its art deco styled venue dating from the 1940’s.  The city is known for its bike friendly environment even including traffic lights designed for their passage through town-one of very few cities in the country to do so.

While up in Santa Margarita we had lunch at a place called The Porch Café displaying a fabulous example of a Long Horn cow’s skull on one of its walls.  They make a delicious burger and fries well worth the wait.  This town has a very Western feel with one small main street that includes a variety of “antique” stores and our lunch spot.  Just outside of town the countryside is made up of large ranches that sport either cattle, horses or vineyards.  The required dress code seems to be jeans and cowboy boots for nine out of ten people standing in line at the café.  We had the jeans but my cowboy boots are in Florida.