Inside San Luis Obispo

• Three-hour walking, hiking, biking, or driving tour of San Luis Obispo or environs for a party of up to ten led by James Papp, architectural historian.
• Afternoon tea in the garden of the Sauer-Adams, San Luis Obispo’s Gothic Revival Monterey Style adobe, on eighteenth-century china with the best of local foods.

San Luis Obispo— tiłhini for the Northern Chumash—is the perfect way station between San Francisco and Los Angeles (which is why it also claims the world’s first motel). Gain access to its history, secrets, and private buildings on a three-hour tour from James Papp, principal at Historicities and former chair of the San Luis Obispo’s preservation commission. Architects from Julia Morgan to Frank Lloyd Wright, Warren Leopold, and Edla Muir designed buildings here, Joaquin Murieta held the town hostage; Jack Kerouac’s ghost haunts a local rooming house; and there is also a rich racial history, with extant Chumash dwellings, Chinatown, Japantown, and an African American hub.

Relax at the end of your tour with sumptuous tea at the Sauer-Adams Adobe, San Luis’s second oldest building, with local delicacies (and peculiarities), including from the Madonna Inn and Mee Heng Low, our 95-year-old Chinese noodle house.