Wine Tasting, Hearst Castle & Welcoming Cayacos
The first thing I wanted to know about traveling to Cayacos, CA, was how to pronounce the darned place.
After much inquiry from locals and failed attempts to learn it, I finally got it right. It’s “Ki-YUK-us.”
Why I was there in the first place was because a travel Public Relations agency, Mental Marketing of Ventura, CA, send me there on a travel writer’s press FAM trip.
A FAM – or familiarity – trip is common for travel writers. I get invited on a few each year. Some travel writers do dozens of them, hopping around the world from one to another.
This particular one was an individual trip, not a group one with other writers. And what a great trip!
First of all it was extremely well organized. I was provided with a complete itinerary with exact details of where to be and when to be there, addresses and an on-site contact person, who was alerted ahead of time that PubClub.com would be in the house.
All my associate and I had to do was show up on time to the designated places.
And what places there were – we went to the spectacular Heart Castle, did wine tastings across Pacific Coast Highway at the Hearst Winery tasting room and at Harmony Cellars and had breakfast, lunch and dinner at so delicious many places we left the place ready to pop. And, while it’s not my thing, we had to visit the famous Butter Brown Cookie Company.
We stayed at the On The Beach B&B, a five-start property overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the Cayacous pier where happy hostess Susie kept filling us up with wine and her delicious food offerings for breakfast and during the hotel’s nightly “social hour.” Susie proved to be social for a lot more than an hour.
As a result, I posted seven stories from this two-day FAM trip. And counting.
Cheers!
Leave a Reply