Davenport - the one in California

Continuing on our adventure down Highway 1, Clif surprised me with "Captain Davenport's Retreat" - which turned out to be the corner suite at the Davenport Roadhouse hotel and restaurant. Fairly swanky for such a small town. The suite was awesome, with floor to ceiling windows on two whole walls, perfect for beach viewing.

The town itself consists of the hotel where we stayed, a really adorable and no-nonsense bakery (see photo below of Whale City Bakery), and the sketchiest general store I've entered in quite some time. I'm fairly certain the bookkeeper was in the back room chain smoking cigarettes, and had been for the past 20 years. Anyway, we bought a bottle of wine there for $11.99, which is reasonable in that area.

We headed last-minute to the Beauregard Vineyard's tasting room, where Clif and I were educated more by our fellow wine-taster than the mostly-toasted gentleman pouring our wines. It took a bit longer than normal to do the tasting because drunky kept getting distracted by pretty much anything that moved, or didn't move for that matter. "ooh! a fly! Ohh, a glass of wine! Oh! I told a stupid joke!" You get the idea. Eventually we bought a bottle of wine because they waved the wine tasting fee.

Turns out, the Davenport Roadhouse closes for Monday dinner, which was THE ONE NIGHT we were there. And, as I mentioned before, the town is small. Clif and I found a pretty severely hipster joint in Santa Cruz, called 515 Kitchen. The place vomited hipsters all over my overly-prepared basil and homemade chartreuse-orange-monk-inspired bitters, but I drank it and loved it. Actually, despite the hipsterness, this place had excellent customer service and top-notch food. On top of that, we had called to make reservations and mentioned it was our 1 year anniversary. When we arrived, the hostess informed us that they had a staff meeting about where to seat us in the restaurant, couldn't decide, so they had reserved TWO tables for us to pick from. Okay. Kinda weird but really cute. And we got to sit on a couch for dinner, which I liked a lot. 

The best part of Davenport was the short walk to the beach. Once we arrived home from Santa Cruz, we grabbed a bottle of wine and a blanket, walked 3 minutes across the street to a beach, which we shared with 2 other groups, but for all intents and purposes were alone. 

It was a perfect evening; romantic, peaceful, full-mooned and only slightly colder. AMAZING.

The next morning, we grabbed quick breakfast sandwiches from the Whale City Bakery, and had great service and yummy breakfast. 

Then.... we turned left. On Highway 1. Which doubles as south. That's the way we went.

More tomorrow.

Look! They make hydrants in yellow!
Oh, and our room was on the top floor in the corner.

The restaurant had pretty decent food for lunch. I had pizza, because I'm
dairy and gluten free. Duh.

The Roadhouse and hwy 1. The beach is just right of that car. Small-town lookin'.

The Bakery! For the only place to eat in town that was open, it was GREAT.