I have a confession: I’ve never seen the movie “Avatar.” I somehow missed it in its heyday and it’s one of those movies I tend to forget about until it pops up on TV. So, from the few minutes I’ve caught in channel flipping, this is the extent of what I gathered: it’s about blue creatures

When we decided to overnight in Cambria during our California Central Coast road-trip, we had a hard time picking which part of the city to stay in. For a teeny, tiny town like Cambria (population 6,000), that sounds silly to say, but there were in fact two distinct options.

It was shortly after 8 p.m. when we walked in to the lobby at the Sea Shore Motel. We had not had dinner yet and most of the local restaurants were closing in an hour. “We’ll just check in really quick, grab our key and head out,” I thought, naively. There are certain charms about smaller hotels.

Striking hilltop mansions, rugged cliffs and dramatic sunsets combine to make California’s Central Coast a bucket list destination. Like many visitors to the area, we opted to do a road trip along the stretch of Pacific Coast Highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.