In the morning we said goodbye to cousin Emma’s family, then abducted Grandma Susie to take her up the California coast.

As usual, the kids have perfect timing on when they need to go to the bathroom. It is much more adventurous to choose points in our travel where there is no sign of civilization 100 miles in any direction, of course   Among other bathroom luck- one stop we were supposed to pay for bathroom use, but both doors were open: the Women’s had water constantly flowing out of the toilet and the Men’s had cockroaches. This time we were in the middle civilization (L.A.), but we struck out – gas stations without ice and employee-only bathrooms without toilet paper. We were saved by a grocery store.

Onto the more pleasant parts of our day: the California Coast. We weathered typical L.A. traffic to make it to Carpenteria where we visited Dustin’s aunt who was renting a house for a month. We checked out a nearby farmer’s market with beautiful plump local avocados and strawberries, then picked up some delicious tacos (and sampled the amazingly diverse salsa bar). The weather was cooler than Seattle’s, which meant no beach fun, but the park was super cool:

Then we headed up a mountain to view the Chumash Painted Cave. The drive up was a little hairy: a steep, skinny road with sharp turns & locals who whipped around the corners much too fast, nearly for the their last time had we plowed them off the cliff. We emerged above the clouds to get to the cave:

The cave was easy to find as it was heavily protected by iron bars:

Being paintings on rock, they are technically pictographs, as we learned on our last road trip. Some say these were inspired by a solar eclipse.

Finally, we drove up to Atascadero for a late night check-in, once again. Our average check-in time thus far is 9:30pm.