Morning: we got up, packed.  Dad was a little light-headed, due to his blood pressure meds.  (oh, good, another medical thing we have to worry about – but he just stopped taking that one med and was mostly fine thereafter). I went down to the cafe and got him a bagel and me a breakfast burrito, and those turned out to be good, although I didn’t finish the burrito.  (side note: even though I’ve been off Wegovy due to scarcity and bullshittery from the insurance company since the beginning of December, my appetite seems to still be down in an good way.) Then we called the bellhop so we didn’t have to schlep the luggage, and I checked out and fetched the car. and we loaded up.  (another side note: we really liked staying at the Biltmore. Staff was wonderful.)

We needed to go to a drugstore to get more ice and stuff, but decided to play pot luck.  Also, it eventually occurred to me that hotels have ice machines, and from that point on, never actually bought ice for the cooler again. I wanted to see the Santa Monica pier, so we headed out that way, but it turned out once we got there, we’d have to u-turn and go south and decided not to.  Up in Malibu, we finally decided to do a search for drugstores and found one literally on the other side of the highway, a little behind where we were. So now we did u-turn and got our supplies.

Headed up the coast as much as possible, listening to podcasts and music.  We did see a lot of those interesting (and some ugly) Malibu beach houses that are unfortunately cinders now.

One of the places we’d thought about visiting, particularly since it seemed to do Christmas right, was Solvang. It sounded adorable. But with Dad’s shoulder and energy level, I’d given up on doing any random ‘hey let’s look at this’ stops. However, when we randomly pulled off for gas and bio-break, turns out we’d picked the exit to Solvang. The turn to which was backed up down the exit ramp all the way to the highway. Apparently, everyone wanted to see the Christmas delights of Solvang this Sunday. So we turned the other way and saw nothing. That was a shame.

Kept going up and agreed we were both hungry, so in Los Morros , we stopped at a Mexican cafe and had enchiladas and tacos. It was clearly a place frequented by actual Mexicans, not touristy, but they were very kind to us gringos and the food was really good.

We arrived at our charming and funky hotel (The Cavalier Resort) to find out that the power was out all over San Simeon until 630ish, maybe.  They didn’t seem that bothered by it, told us where the emergency flashlight was in the room, and also handed us a couple of glowsticks. Huh, OK, what do we do now? The ‘resort’ itself (it wasn’t really a particularly fancy resort) was right on the water and had a nice setup with benches and a couple of fire pits (you could buy s’mores-makings from them) and a huge chess board and checker board. But it was cold and windy, so not really conducive to hanging out there. Actually, this was now the first we learned of something that became a theme over the next few days – the CA coast was being hit with huge powerful waves. So it actually wasn’t safe to, for instance, walk along the beach.

So what do we do this afternoon instead of hanging out in the power-less hotel? We decided to head to a far-away Kohls in Paso Robles about 45 minutes away to buy clothes for both of us. (Dad needed larger tops because of the sling, and he’d been stealing my t-shirts). They had power and that all worked out just fine. We were dreading hitting a clothing store the Sunday before Christmas (a holiday we were otherwise ignoring), but it wasn’t really that crowded. Well, we mentioned that to the checkout lady and she said, ‘for us, this is very crowded’. Oh, OK.

Back to the hotel, still no power.  We broke a couple of the glowsticks and chilled in the room until 600, then went over to the restaurant, which had generator power.  I had a (bad) cosmo, Dad had a (bad) glass of Sauvignon Blanc, then we both got (different) glasses of wine.  Somewhere in there, the power came on, yay! He ordered a salmon burger, I just got a regular cheeseburger, both with coleslaw.  His was structurally unsound, but mine was simple enough (not a lot of ridiculous toppings) that I could eat it as a sandwich.  Shared carrot cake for dessert. This wasn’t fine dining, but actually a rather nice meal and nice company, maybe one of the top father/son moments of the trip.