Day 4: Friday: CalTech and the drive to Cambria

The day started by checking out of the vertigo asylum...we were on the 5th floor of an atrium style hotel. Between driving through mountain passes and walking to our room, my fear of heights was getting quite the workout. Never made it to the pool here, but oh well.



Spent the morning at CalTech, which was not Josh's cup of tea. The entire undergraduate enrollment is only 900 students, very small. They require five terms of math and five terms of physics as part of their core curriculum. The exciting stuff is that even undergraduate students get to work on research projects for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory [JPL] on missions like the Mars rover and landing probes on the moons of Jupiter. The not so good stuff is there's not so much social life, and the students spend half of their free time devising elaborate pranks to play on each other, and the other half plotting revenge on MIT which stole CalTech's cannon and transported it clear across the country.

The campus was nice enough...it's used for the set of the CBS show Numbers, which all the CalTechies make fun of, calling it a derogatory name that i can't remember. Here's the faculty club, the Atheneum, which is often used for weddings:



Of course, then there are very strange signs like this one. I mean, have you ever heard of a warning against removing the animals? What kind of sick rituals go on there?



We got to see the inside of some CalTech dorms, which was interesting, the only ones we've been allowed in so far. They're set up as houses like in Harry Potter...you join one during rotation week in your freshman year and stay there for the duration of your CalTech life. Everyone in the house eats dinner together at the same time, with a waitstaff to serve the food, which is family style. We ate at one of the cafeterias which they use for lunch, which wasn't bad. Probably some healthier food choices than at other places we had seen, and no Taco Bell franchise.

From CalTech we started our trip to Cambria, which is halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. We headed back down to Santa Monica first to pick up the Pacific Coast Highway there...we didn't want to miss passing through Malibu, which was absolutely gorgeous. Didn't stop for any good pictures though. Then on up the coast and through the mountain passes of the Santa Monica Mountains...



...and down into Santa Barbara, which was also beautiful, all those houses built into the mountainside with what must be gorgeous ocean views. We hit some pretty bad traffic there, construction, and made a planned break for La Super Rica Taqueria, one of the taco places mentioned in the New York Times article [see right]. Julia Child ate there. David Crosby eats there. And we ate there. It looks like a little hole in the wall, and it is...



...but as soon as you get to the order window you can see it's a different kind of place just by looking at [and smelling] the grill.



We ordered the simplest tacos, just beef and salsa, $2 for 2 tacos. Even without the salsa, the meat was seasoned extraordinarily. With the salsa? Heaven. Josh wasn't as impressed because they didn't serve all the Taco Bell fixings...cheese and the like...not quite understanding that Taco Bell serves that stuff to mask the flavorless crap it calls a taco.

Then on up through San Luis Obispo...by this time the left sides of our faces were getting burned from constant exposure to the sun all afternoon...and we started hitting the fog banks around Morro Bay.



We lost the light, the temperature dropped about 10 degrees, and we raced the last few miles past Harmony [Population 18] and into Cambria, where we found the hotel without any trouble.