Today we continue the Tourin’ Over California trip report series with day 4! It’s our road trip day today, and in this installment we head from San Francisco down the coast to Los Angeles, not without a few stops along the way…
DAY 4 – SEPTEMBER 15, 2018
This morning we were up bright and early to pick up our rental car and start our road trip! This was something all three of us were actually very excited about because it was unlike anything we’ve done before. And we had an 8-hour playlist of hits to keep us entertained!!
We said goodbye to our home for the past few nights, the Grant Hotel:
and packed up our rental car:
After a bit of struggle with setting up the bluetooth on the car we were on our way. We had planned a few stops along the way strategically to break it up a little bit. Our first stop came very soon – the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden.
I don’t even remember where we read about this place or how we found it, but it was BEAUTIFUL. As soon as we stepped in we were surrounded by the most stunning array of roses!
They were just everywhere, in every color! It was very peaceful and calming and great for photos, as one would predict.
We commented on how it would be amazing to have a wedding there – you wouldn’t have to worry about decorations!
I loved these streaky ones that really give that Queen of Hearts painting the roses red vibe:
Needless to say, it was an absolutely gorgeous place and we were all so happy to have stopped.
We only stayed for a few minutes so it was a pretty quick stop, and soon we were back on the road – where we stayed for a few hours until our next stop! All of us wanted to take a detour over to Monterey to check out one of the beaches. We found a gorgeous beach that wasn’t too crowded and hopped out to walk around. It was also exciting because this was Sarah’s first time ever touching the Pacific Ocean!! The review: it was cold.
The beach was absolutely STUNNING, but that wasn’t even the best part… we were in love with how many dogs there were on this beach!!
Maybe too much so… in the vlog around 2:57 you can hear Ana say “you could potentially have a full video of dogs swimming”….so I did that.
After we’d had our fill of the beach (and the beach dogs) it was time to get back on the road. And here’s where we ran into a bit of a dilemma…
So here we are, cruising down the road, jamming to our playlist, having a great time. Everything is going fine and we intend to stop in a few hours at In N Out for lunch. It was all good til we looked at the map and realized…we were in the middle of a national park, way further down the map than we had anticipated and there wasn’t really a way to cut across, and our ETA kept getting later and later. AND to top it all off, we didn’t have any service in this area so we couldn’t even find our way out! You can see this realization at about 4:24 in the video.
Long story short, we went about an hour in the wrong direction and figured out it would be faster to TURN AROUND and take a different road back out of Monterey. It was a mess! But luckily we figured it out pretty early on, and we had also left early in the morning to leave time for things like this 🙂 We all just laughed it off and headed back on the correct route. And soon enough, it was time for lunch!
It was our very first time at In N Out and we loved it! I had a double double with a milkshake which was SO good and so cheap! It was easy to see why everyone from California is obsessed with it.
Then it was back in the car! We still had a few hours to go so we didn’t waste any time. The view was a whole lot of this:
But finally many hours later we arrived in LA!!
We found our AirBnB relatively quickly and unloaded our things. Very quick photo tour of the place:
We didn’t have too much time to get ready so we freshened up and were off to a very special show for the evening. Allow me to give you a little backstory on this event… so as you may know by now, Ana, Sarah and I met online many years ago. What you may not know is the specific detail that we first met from online fandom communities. This was way back in probably 2009-ish, when we all used to play games and chat together. The two of them first met on a Lost community and later got me into it as well, and ever since then it’s been a really important part of our friendship!
So when we’re planning this trip a few months before and the creators of Lost announce that there’s going to be a LOST CONCERT in LA on the day we got there… it was pretty much a given that we were going. It was such a beautiful moment of serendipity! So that’s where we were headed tonight and we were so excited!
We spotted our Queen Gaga on the way there:
Before long we were at our destination, The Ford Theatres!
The theatre was a cute outdoor arena and it was pretty small so it felt like a very intimate gathering! Some of the cast from Lost was there, as well as the creators and of course the star of the show – Michael Giacchino who wrote all of the beautiful music for Lost!!
I’m sure it goes without saying but the show was…incredible. They played all our favorites and everything we were hoping for. On some songs, they would have the scene of the show it was from projected onto the screen next to the orchestra, so you could watch it and feel those feelings all over again. We all cried – a lot. If you care to watch some, I put a lot of it in the vlog, starting at about 9:50. If you love Lost like we do, you’ll see why we cried!
After we were completely blown away by the concert, we headed back home and realized we were STARVING and ordered some pizza! We also gave a full review of the show for the vlog as well. Once our food arrived we quickly devoured our pizza and garlic knots and then pretty much passed out!
Even though today was mostly a travel day we still had so much fun! I’m pretty sure we could be doing anything together and we would still have a good time. It was so cool and special to go to the concert together as well, since Lost played such an important part of our friendship from the very beginning ❤️
And that’s a wrap on day 4! I hope you enjoyed this post and video(s) and make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel if you haven’t already – the videos usually go up a little bit before the blog posts so you can get a sneak peek 😉 Thanks for reading/watching and I’ll see you next time!
xo,
