Mini Road Trip: Pescadero, CA

So here we go! About two years ago Joe's brother and sister-in-law, Danny and Denise, got us a one night stay at this turn of the century barn loft in Pescadero, CA. Now I know what you are thinking... where the heck is Pescadero? It is about 14 miles south of Half Moon Bay on California Highway 1. At first we were going to use this as our "Test Drive" for the RV and for bringing our dog, Cash. But unfortunately we figured out that we are not going to be able to bring Cash on the trip, so we decided to just take the car and make it a two day getaway.
We decided to hit up the Gilroy outlets on the way to Pescadero to do some last minute shopping for the trip. We had a little hiccup on the way from Gilroy to Pescadero... My sister and brother-in-law, got us a Garmin GPS for Christmas to help us find our way across America. Well I got "shortest route" and "shortest time" confused when planning our route. So as we headed West to Pescadero we were lead on this tiny one lane road through the mountains... let's just say it was a learning experience and both Joe and I are glad not have been in the trailer (one road actually just physically stopped but not on the GPS).
When we got to the Pescadero Creekside Barn it was pretty awesome. My first reaction was it was a little too romantic, I mean come on they were playing smooth music when we arrived. We decided to eat dinner at the restaurant right next store, Duarte's. It was delicious! Everything was artichoke themed, yum! It was a good end of the day.
The next day we decided to walk around the town a little bit and check out the local scene. The town is just 700 people large. We heard that there was a goat farm and you could go goat cheese tasting, yes! We wanted to get some hiking in first, so we headed toward the beach. We hiked around the Pescadero Marsh for little bit but most of the trails were really overgrown. When we got to the coast we noticed that Half Moon Bay was just 14 miles north on Hwy 1. We drove down Main st., Half Moon Bay and checked out the town. Really cute local Ma & Pa shops, Joe noticed a large Portuguese Hall and mural, which led us to believe that they had a large Portuguese population. Then we saw a poster for their Portuguese Celebration (those are the festivals where Joe cooks soupage for hours in 60-80 gallons pots). On the ride back to Pescadero we stopped at a vista point so Joe could take some pictures of the coast. We found a trail that headed down the cliff and we wanted to see if it would head all the way to the beach below. It actually did there was just a little trail at the end where we had to scale down the cliff on a rope! Joe headed straight for it and I hesitated, but it was well worth it. When we got to the bottom it was a beautiful, empty beach.
We headed back to town to do some goat cheese tasting! All through the town we kept seeing these wooden cut-outs of a little girl pulling a goat and she was pointing. Well she was pointing the way to the goat farm. The farm had about 300 goats, they even had a lama(he did not want me to take his photo!). We tried many different kinds of goat cheeses; chive, peppercorn, dill, cranberry, chevre, they even had ricotta goat cheese! We ended up buying the chive goat cheese.
After our fun filled day we headed back to the barn and packed the car to head back to Hanford.
We should be leaving in the RV tomorrow to head out on our Road Trip! First stop... Palm Springs, CA.