Our California Trip - Where Did We Stay?

You may recall that in May, my husband and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. We decided to celebrate by taking a trip. We threw out many destination possibilities, but we nixed most of them because we realized we wanted to include our kids on those trips. My sister suggested Paso Robles, California so we looked into that. Paso Robles has been described as "What Sonoma & Napa were 20 years ago" before they became so touristy. So Paso Robles became focus of our trip.

We started our trip on a Friday with a 9 hour car drive to Indianapolis. We arranged for our kids to stay 3 nights at each of the grandparents' houses. It was great for the kids to get to spend quality time with each of their 3 grandmas and 2 grandpas.

On Saturday, we said our goodbyes and flew to San Francisco. We were not able to get a direct flight, so we had a layover in Houston. We arrived in San Francisco around 9 pm. We picked up our rental car, a huge Mercury Grand Marquis. We got a great deal on the car directly through Thrifty Car Rental's website.

We got the "Wild Car" Deal. It was $137 for a week, guaranteed to be a mid-sized or larger. They chose the car. I had seen the same deal a few weeks earlier for $245. Timing is EVERYTHING! The car was a little bigger than we needed, but we got used to driving around in what we called "the old people" car.

For our first night, we stayed at the Hilton San Francisco Airport Bayfront. We made our reservation through Priceline for this one. This hotel was our only big chain during our vacation. We decided it would be more interesting to stay in boutique hotels instead of chains. But since we were arriving late into San Francisco, we just needed a hotel that was close to the airport.

Our next 3 nights, we stayed at the Paso Robles Inn, in downtown Paso Robles.

The downtown location was wonderful. We were able to walk to dozens of restaurants, tasting rooms, and shops.


Our room was in this building. Our balcony was the top right one.


One of the things that I liked about the inn, was that it is on the registry of Historic Hotels.

This is the lobby to the building we stayed in. It was always completely deserted. There was a large ball room off to the side that was always set up for something, but that something never happened. For our first 2 days, we didn't see a single person. I was convinced that we were the only ones staying in that building. We finally saw a housekeeper and then a few other guests as our stay progressed.

Our room was nice and big and with a huge bathroom. (Of course, I didn't bother to take a picture of the bathroom.) They also had a nice variety of pillows - some soft, some firm. We appreciated that.


We had a fireplace, too. We even used it. The weather was unseasonably cool according to the locals. They were calling it "June-uary". We were quite happy to have cooler temps. Our entire week in California was in the upper 60s and low 70s. A huge difference from the weeks of 90 degree days we've had in Georgia.


Our room was a Deluxe King Spa room. The inn is known for their hot springs mineral spas, so of course, we had to get a room with one of those. Natural hot springs have a strong sulphur smell. The Inn provided little packets of "spa scents" to help cover the smell. You can see the curtain next to the spa. We were able to completely enclose our balcony.

The grounds were beautiful. Lots of gardens and Koi ponds. There was a pool, but it was too cool to use it in our opinion.

After our 3 nights at Paso Robles, we drove up to San Jose. We stayed at the Dolce Hayes Mansion.



The Hayes Mansion was once a private estate and is also on the National Register of Historic Places.


We got a great deal on this hotel. Around the time I was looking at hotels, I received an email from Expedia. It was for 50% off 2 different hotels - one in Cancun and the other in San Jose. I wasn't really sure where San Jose was in relationship to Paso Robles & San Francisco, but when I looked into it, I found that it was between the two cities, but closer to San Francisco. Plus, San Jose is right around where all the computer geek places are, so that was a plus, too! The sale was for only 12 hours, so we jumped on that. It ended up being our favorite hotel on the trip.


View into our parlor suite from the front entry.


Bedroom view - this hotel had the most comfortable mattress.


Living Room area.

We only stayed at the Hayes Mansion for one night. Then we headed back to San Francisco for the remainder of our trip.

In San Francisco, we stayed downtown in the theater district at the Warwick San Francisco. I found this hotel just from searching on the internet. It had a nice location (2 blocks from Union Square and a short walk to Chinatown) and a reasonable price considering it was in downtown SF.



Our room was a "petite suite" and featured a crown canopied bed and a balcony.


View of our parlor from the entry.

All 3 of our boutique hotels provided us with robes during our stay. The robes at the Hayes Mansion were the nicest! We contemplated buying some to take home with us. The Warwick even provided us with an umbrella, thankfully we didn't need it. There was no rain on our vacation.

My next blog entries will have more details about what we did on our vacation.