Kreuzberg California

If you will indulge me in one more post from our two days in SLO, I have to write about our favorite coffee shop. There are probably other good places for caffeine and breakfast in SLO, but we liked Kreuzberg so much on our first morning that we returned for the second day.

Kreuzberg California says this about its origins: Kreuzberg California opened its doors in downtown San Luis Obispo in 2010 as an experiment in combining the vibrant cafe scene of the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin, with the chill breezy lifestyle of San Luis Obispo. The idea was to create a place where you could grab a cappuccino in the morning, a sando at lunch, and then close up your laptop for cocktails with friends at night. We love our community.

We recommend the breakfast burritos and the cappuccinos.

Tip: Parking is easy to find on the street before 9 a.m. while it is still free. Parking in SLO is generally not easy and not free.

More Atlas Obscura in SLO

Here are three more places we found during our short stay in SLO thanks to Atlas Obscura.

1. Madonna Inn

I love the description, “Writer Umberto Eco perhaps described it best, imagining the decor was conceived when “Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minelli.”

2. The Dorn Pyramid

Located in the cemetery near the Madonna Inn is a tomb for the Dorn family.

3. Bubblegum Alley

Here it is, but I wouldn’t make a special trip to see it.

Poly Canyon – San Luis Obispo

Last week we went to SLO for a few days. The last time we spent time there was in 2013. This time I looked at Atlas Obscura to see what else we might enjoy in this cute college town.

The thing that piqued my interest the most was the Poly Canyon Experimental Structures Lab. As usual with Atlas Obscura, it was not easy to find where we were going. The road leading to parking was blocked off, so we used our phones to find an alternative path. That led us along a stream, scrambling across rocks while we could see the fire road across the way.

After a half-mile or a little more, we met up with the fire road, where we saw the first of the structures. “The site is an “outdoor experimental construction laboratory” for the university students. The structures were all built by architectural, engineering, and design students over the last several decades. They range from sculptures to semi-houses, but most of the structures fall somewhere in between.”

We only had 45 minutes on our parking meter, but I could have stayed another hour looking at everything. On the way back we took the fire road for most of it, found a stream crossing and took the path back to the car.