The Road to Paso Robles

I went for a walk in the morning, but due to having no sense of direction and not really knowing where I was, I had to keep it kind of short.  I walked around the streets around Melanie's house in Lakewood, which is surrounded by Long Beach.  Lakewood is an entirely residential community build in the mid-50s.  The houses are all very attractive - typical California bungalows.  According to Melanie, there are only five styles of homes in all of Lakewood, but you would never know it to look at the homes: people have made them unique with plantings and landscaping and painting the exteriors.  I think I could happily live here, except for the other things that come with living in California - the smog, the earthquakes and the crime .   I took a picture of some beautiful bougainvillea spilling over a wall into an empty lot when I inadvertently wandered into an area I probably shouldn't have been in.  At that point I turned around and retraced my steps lest I become lost. 

We left Los Angeles in the morning, at about 10:00 am - we were waiting until rush hour had passed so we could make it through the city at a reasonable rate.  It turns out that rush hour never really ends here.

The drive to Paso Robles normally takes four hours, but we had to stop for a few bathroom breaks and lunch, so it took us somewhat longer than that.   The scenery is quite nice- on the left hand side, the Pacific Ocean and on the right hand side, once out LA, endless hills that look like the outdoor set of M*A*S*H - it was filmed here, after all.

We stopped for lunch in a small town, typical of small towns on highways all over Canada and the United States: mostly restaurants and hotels clustered around the interchange, and plenty of parking all around.  There are two large-ish restaurants at this interchange, one largely catering to tourists and the other just a normal little restaurant.   

 The one we did not eat at was called Andersons Pea Soup Restaurant.  We decided that it was unlikely that their soup would be made without bacon or a ham hock in there somewhere, so we opted for the oddly named, for a restaurant, Mother Hubbard's Kitchen.  Linda and I had tomato and avocado sandwiches and Melanie, Leslie and Auntie Frances had burgers.  I am including a link to the pea soup restaurant website here.  It turns out that their soup is vegetarian and gluten free.  If the photos that accompany the menu are any indication, the soup is a very unappetizing green - kind of like the green in Green Eggs and Ham, or the Ooblek in Bartholomew and the Ooblek.  
http://www.peasoupandersens.net

I wanted to reflect a bit on the concept of a restaurant that centres on pea soup.  I hope I'm not the only person who finds that a little unusual.  I've seen restaurants that focus on burgers, or on ribs.  I've seen steakhouses and pancake houses. I've seen and rejoiced in vegan restaurants, but I've never seen a soup house, specifically a pea soup house.  Not only does this place boast a huge dining room with a substantial parking lot, it also has a hotel attached to it, presumably for people who love pea soup so much that they are willing to rent a room so that they will be close to this soup for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Strangely, the menu does not say that pea soup is part of every entree so why the restaurant bills itself as a pea soup restaurant remains a mystery to me.

And I'll go even further: not only does this pea soup restaurant have a hotel for pea soup lovers, it also has a "put your head through the hole and take a picture of yourself splitting peas" gizmo in the parking lot, so that people who have dined and slept there can take pictures of themselves with a cartoon body, while that cartoon body splits peas with an axe!  Those pea soup people sure love their peas!   While I didn't eat at the restaurant, I still did the tourist thing and had my picture taken in this gizmo.

Then we were off to continue our trip up to Paso Robles.

A New Blog

I will be writing about travel, travel gear, and travel destinations, all from a vegan perspective.