Picking California’s Central Coast

We returned from Bristol and settled into our old routines and lifestyle.  We loved our time in England and started to plan our next adventure. Then, “life” started to get in the way.  Nancy had established quite a reputation as an event planner and before our trip to Camano she “chaired” a fair size fiber-arts conference in Monterey.  Her management of that conference met with rave reviews and raised the bar for this series of bi-annual conferences.  I have referred to the Monterey conference as part of a bi-annual series and this series is affectionately referred to as the “small conferences (workshops only)”.  On alternate years there is a big conference set in a much larger venue with vendors and exhibits in addition to classes and workshops.

Nancy was approached to chair the “large” conference for the year 2010.  It takes a couple of years to set up a conference of this magnitude.  One of her committee chairmen for the 2005 conference agreed to co-chair with Nancy.

A conference of this size requires some amount of work to plan and to the set up the foundation: pick a venue, find appropriate chairpersons, set up schedules, and a myriad of decisions and plans.  I was content to put traveling plans on the back burner until the 2010 conference was over.  I have dozens of project to keep me entertained.

In addition to the 2010 conference, our son has presented us with a grandson.  We both have looked forward to having grandchildren and expected that having them would have an impact on our lives.

As time has passed, the work needed for the 2010 conference has been entrusted to committee chairmen and Nancy’s day-to-day involvement, for a while, will be nominal. 

  Our involvement with our grandson has proven to be considerably less than we had envisioned.  As a result, the itch to explore has crept back into our lives.  The level of our responsibilities would restrict any long-range travel, but if we were within a couple of hours of home we might be able to make it work.

By the time the conference needs more direct supervision, we will be back in Mountain View.

California is a fantastically diverse place.  The northwest coastal corner is a huge redwood forest with almost a rain-forest climate while the southeast corner is desert with no rain and summer temperatures as high as the 120’s.  In between there is just about every variation imaginable.  Within the limits that we set and thought we could still fulfill our present responsibilities were several interesting places.  We eliminated the coast north of the Golden Gate Bridge because of the perpetual traffic jam that seems to have taken up permanent residency.

The three places that bubbled to the top were: Folsom, a small town just east of Sacramento; The Delta, the convergence of the Sacramento River, the San Joaquin River and the eastern-most extension of the San Francisco Bay; and the Central Coast of California, a collection of eight-to-ten small coastal towns clustered around San Luis Obispo.  We have had sampled each of these regions but never taken the time to explore them in any depth.

The major attractions to Folsom are the State Capital, the Gold Country and its proximity to the Sierra Nevada Mountains (7,000-14,000 foot peaks). Much of California’s early history is tied to the gold in this area; the high mountains are spectacular and the region features both oak and pine forests.  Sampling the golf courses alone would warrant an extended stay.
                Discovery Bay

A community carved out ot the edge of California Delta.  At the meeting of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and eastern extention of the San Francisco Bay
             Morro Bay, California

Showing the Harbor and Morro Rock.  The rock is the heart of an extinct volcano.
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Discovery Bay is a waterfront community of about 3,500 homes.  By carving the land at the edge of the delta marsh into channels, islands and peninsulas, the developer made many of these homes waterfront.  It is possible to park your yacht at your own private dock and yet have deep-water access to the Pacific Ocean via San Francisco Bay.  The summers are sunny, warn but a little windy.

People, not from California, think of the San Francisco Bay, as a suburb of Los Angles.  Actually, L.A. is 400 miles (640 km) south of San Francisco.  Most of the land between these two large metropolitan areas is very rural.  Some of the land is devoted to some of the richest farmland in the world. Halfway between is the town of San Luis Obispo.  San Luis Obispo is home to “Cal-Poly”, one of California’s more prestigious engineering colleges. 

San Luis Obispo (SLO) is separated from the ocean by a very small mountain range and enjoys a typical Southern California coastal climate – warm days and cool nights.  North and south of SLO are a string of coastal towns.  Because mountains do not protect these towns, they have markedly different climates.  The costal towns enjoy a climate very similar to that of San Francisco.  Mark Twain once commented that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.  The Pacific Ocean is very cold all year around and this cold water makes the coast very foggy, but not particularly damp.  The fog only penetrates a couple of miles inland at most. The beauty of the coastal towns is that you can live at a summer temperature in the high 60’s – low 70’s, with no rain, but can drive only a couple of miles to visit temperatures in the 80’s and 90’s.
The other side of comfort is the winters.  Basically the ocean temperature is unaffected by the season.  So, the water is the same temperature during the winter as summer.  When the winter temperatures plunge, the on-shore breeze is now comparatively warm and 50’s and 60’s are the rule during the winter.

For this adventure, we picked California’s Central Coast.  The next step was to find someplace to actually live.
The Delta is where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet the salt water of San Francisco Bay.  This is an 1,100-square mile marsh, reclaimed as about 700 islands by levees.  Chinese workers built the levees in the 1850’s. The Delta has hundreds of miles of tidal waterways.  Some of these waterways are navigable by ocean-going ships, giving access to inland ports of Sacramento and Stockton.  The area that we found attractive was a real estate development called “Discovery Bay”
                            Folsom

A city on the eastern edge of the City of Sacramento.  On the slope of the Serria Nevada Mountain, this area is know as the "Gold Country" and was the center of California's Gold Rush.  The water is the Amercan River just downstream from the Folsom Dam