gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

If you do drive north, you could try stopping off in San Luis Obispo and getting breakfast in the Big Sky cafe. I came out to the west coast recently and did the PCH drive from north to south and had the best breakfast of my whole trip there. See my travel sketchbook blog for the sketch I did while eating breakfast http://travelsketch.blogspot.com/2006/09/saturday-29th-july-best-breakfast-of.html. You might also get a few ideas for other places you could drive too if you read the entries for my whole trip summarised here http://travelsketch.blogspot.com/2006/07/sketching-in-southwestern-states-of.html

Cambria Pines Lodge:
http://www.cambriapineslodge.com/

Or just about any of the other Cambria Inns. It feels like you are SO far from L.A., and one of the first places where the forest and ocean start to meet.

Another option is to take the Coast Starlight train from LA (LA or Van Nuys stations) up to San Luis Obispo, and when you get off you can either stay in SLO or take a shuttle up to Los Osos / Baywood (beautiful back bay area). From Los Osos, you can get to the Montana de Oro state park which is SPECTACULAR and it's no problem finding an entire beach area to yourself.

The train is nice because your little vacation starts the instant you board so you don't have to drive through LA. And that train spends a lot of time literally *right on* the ocean.

Have fun!

The Madonna Inn is probably booked up this weekend (I understand you need to make reservations very early), but there are several nice hotels in San Luis Obispo. Quality Suites or Apple Farm are also nice places to stay and are more likely to have rooms on short notice.

I like to take people to the Big Sky Cafe (Broad St. and Higuera) in downtown SLO or to the Edna Valley winery (my favorite label, Sorry Hugh, I've never had a chance to try Stormhoek). If you do come to SLO, have a martini at Giuseppe's.

The train is nice too, but it's slow, and there's only one train per day that comes all the way to SLO (the rest stop at Santa Barbara). Also, Union Pacific owns the track and have been known to delay Amtrak several hours to let some freight through, but that hasn't happened to me yet.

Sequoias are beautiful. 4 hours north of LA. Dont have specific lodging recs because I always camp...

Last year my wife, daughter and I did a little tour of Northern California - we especially liked Paso Robles (which is, I think, a couple of hours from LA). We stayed at the Paso Robles Inn, the room was nice - we could have upgraded to a room with spa, but we were only staying the night and didn't seem worth it as the pool was pretty good. It's a nice neat little town with plenty of interesting restaurants and also a fairground. It's close to enough to Hearst Castle which although it's quite touristy is quite romantic, and San Simeon beach which I liked. The stuff I blogged about it at the time is here http://www.devel.co.uk/?pg=10

Cambria that Kathy mentioned is a nice small, very touristy coastal town even closer to Hearst Castle - my thoughts of it are somewhat clouded as I got food poisoning from a restaurant there. Just do a bit of investigating if you're staying there as there were alot of slightly out of town Motel 6 type places - not that there is anything wrong with them, we stayed at one, but not what I'd call romantic.

Have fun!

I run a start up we have a massive selection of vacation rental properties, so if you are looking for a house to have your romantic weekend let me know. I am sure I can help you get a kick ass place.

R.

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