San Francisco to LA 10th-18th April - Part one

Well we have been busy since leaving San Francisco.  We braved the roads in a tiny little Chevy Aveo automatic and our GPS which we purchased. The car has AM/FM radio and is super tiny but very fuel efficient (You will see just how tiny in the photos).  After San Francisco we headed to Santa Clara for a brief visit for lunch.  From there we headed to Monteray and stayed the night.  The next day we checked out the Aquarium which was pretty impressive.  We decided to keep moving and headed to San Luis Abispo where we planned to stay for the night .  We took the main freeways whilst we were getting used to the driving and it makes the trips so much shorter as you are just driving on a straight road.  The scenery by the freeway in these areas is mainly hundreds and hundreds of acres of crops of artichokes, celery, strawberries etc which obviously suit the climates here.  I am the chief navigator and Jase is the driver so I managed to punch in instructions to find a shopping mall once we reached San Luis Abispo and we ended up in a place called Pismo Beach.  It was a awesome small township of beautiful beach and expensive hillside houses.  We decided to stay here for the night and splashed out on a nice hotel looking over the beach with a spa and swimming pool.  It was basically an upmarket coastal township and obviously people that lived here have lots of money. There was also the side of town with lots of rentals and bachs for all the surfies that reminded us of a place called Riversdale near home.  It was quite a small compact place but very relaxing and just had a great feel about it.  We also went down for a drive to another coastal township called Avila Beach which was even more upmarket like Eastbourne.  We ended up staying another night in Pismo Beach and just pottered around the shops and walked on the beach and just soaked up the sun.  The next day we headed to Hearst Castle which is a National Park with a Castle that was built back in the 1920's as a private home.  This was fantastic and has been restored over the last 50 years so we did a tour of this - I really enjoyed the castle. The art work and furniture are all original and were really interesting. The castle was donated by the Hearst family to the State.  I think the main castle has something like 127 rooms but there were also something like 6 guest houses aswell.  A beautiful place!  We then made our way to Santa Barbara - This was a beautiful place.  The streets are nice, the beach is awesome, the people are quite friendly too.  We stayed in another nice place with a pool and we definitely needed a swim that day the temperature was 33 degrees.  Since we have been in America we have had no rain at all and since we have moved closer to LA the weather has been exceptional.  We had a drive around Santa Barbara the next day, looked at the shops and made our way to Malibu Beach.