Pismo Beach Adventures

We just got back from our week in Pismo Beach.

It's not a glamorous destination like our trip to Italy, but it was a whole lot of fun.

We still have the pop-up tent trailer and stayed in the place we always stay in when we visit Pismo, Pismo Coast Village RV Resort.

It's not camping out in nature, but it is fun for the kids. There is a swimming pool, ping pong table, video arcade, and the beach is across the street, over the bluffs. And you can still do the campfire thing, the S'mores thing.

We've been to Pismo three or four times now, so I've got a great list of suggestions of things to do/see and places to eat.

Be sure to rent or bring bikes, because the town is so small, you can pretty much bike to most of these places from your campsite.

Here's my list:

EATING OUT

Del's Pizza in Shell Beach (just up the road from Pismo). Good thin-crust pizza, old-fashioned Italian restaurant.

Pismo Beach Fish and Chips. Another old-school joint. Delicious fish and chips. Kids enjoy playing the "IQ game" before the meal.

Doc Bernstein's Ice Cream Lab has wonderfully high-in-butterfat kind of ice cream. They make it on the premises. Younger kids would love the model train that rolls on a track located above your head.

Doc Bernstein's is located in the nearby town of Arroyo Grande. (If you're ambitious, you can ride your bike there. We did. It's maybe 4 miles up the road from the Oceano Dunes crossroads.)

Update: Here are some photos from our trip in 2007.





DESTINATIONS

Arroyo Grande is a small, picturesque farming town with a Main street that dates back to the turn of the century. There's a cool suspension bridge and wild roosters that live in the park.

Oceano Dunes is for those who like to live on the wild side. It is definitely not for those environmentally minded since this is one of the only beaches where you are allowed to drive the length of the beach in your car. Families bring their Ford trucks and cargo trailers and picnic. Lots of drinking and partying going on.

Oceano is for ATVing in the sand dunes. We rented a dune buggy last year. Don't think we're going to be repeating the experience. Huge monster trucks bearing down on my little dune buggy make me think of death. Also, you've got kids on ATVs and drunk adults on ATVs... sort of a disaster waiting to happen, if you ask me.

Alex loved it (of course) and always wants to go back. The dune buggy was fun.


Avila Beach is a hidden jewel located about a 15-minute drive from Pismo. It's really got everything any person could want in a beach experience. It's a tiny beach town with a harbor beach located over a hill past farmlands and Topanga-style greenery.

Avila Beach has a small, European-style street in front of the harbor with restaurants, coffee houses and a few wine tasting bars and some live music. This is a very small town, maybe 4 blocks total in area.

The beach itself has a park at one end with a playground. The pier is in the middle of town, so Tony could fish if he wanted to. (By the way, Tony caught some mackerel on this trip. We were told they were edible... they weren't!)

Avila Beach also has a natural hot springs. If you can, go to the Sycamore Mineral Springs Resort, which is on the road leading into town, and rent a groovy sulphur-smelly hot tub there. It's only $15 for adults, and $5 for children. The Sycamores is beautiful, and the hot tubs are tucked in the hillside up numerous wooden steps almost like treehouses. Each tub has a name like "Enchantment" or "Bliss."

The highlight of our trip, and one of the coolest things I've ever done, was renting sea kayaks from Central Coast Kayaks in Shell Beach.

Tony and the boys arranged the trip and chose to not tell me that they decided against the "easy" tour and instead chose the 3-hour "caves" tour, where you're going in and out of sea caves on kayaks. This was definitely outside of my comfort zone, but I'm so happy that we did it. It was amazing. I highly recommend the experience. You get to see up-close seals, pelicans, and even one sea otter who evidently likes the attention of the kayakers.

(Max has been sea kayaking before in Monterey, and he says that there the seals will jump onto the back of your kayak.)

Here are the photos our guide took for us on the trip.