My best friend Tina and I were in hanging out on the California Central Coast this last week, from San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay up to San Simeon and Cambria.

We took our bikes cuz when exploring, a bicycle is the perfect balance of covering more ground than walking but doing it slowly enough not to miss the details. We love the details. Life is the details. When Tina and I travel we love to get off the tourist paths as quickly as possible and try to get lost. We want to chat with locals and set ourselves up to see stuff we haven’t seen before. We want to be surprised. It’s why we haunt specialty shops and roadside art galleries and antique stores and hole-in-the-wall cafes—precisely in the hope of discovering something new. It’s also why I always order the most unique item on the menu. It’s why we take the road less traveled.

So did it work? It always works. This time out we learned …

•Female elephant seals and their pups molt in April.
•An Ollalieberry is a cross between a blackberry and a raspberry, and might be the best of both.
•Using raspberry in a rhubarb pie adds sweetness but doesn’t mask the rhubarb the way strawberries do. It’s brilliant.
•A wooden surfboard is built very much like the wing of an airplane.
•In the right context, a purple house can totally work.
•A high tide needs to exceed 5½’ in order to fully access the Morro Bay estuary by kayak.
•Incredibly beautiful translucent lamps can be made from pressed and dried coco leaves.
•Fried polenta cakes are delicious for breakfast.
•There is a staircase trail of 250 steps that leads from the back of the Cambria Pines Lodge down to downtown Cambria. No one needs to climb it, but if you choose to in April you just might come upon a large family of mule deer that in turn may choose to climb with you.
•There are also mule deer that nibble the grass between the hundred year old graves at the Old Santa Rosa Chapel Cemetery.
•The Western Osprey (aka: Seahawk) is one of the most magnificent birds of prey you’ll ever see.

So the lessons of a good get-away are simple … In this world of ours there’s never an excuse for boredom. If you want to live then get out there and live. Start by exploring your own life, your own town. Stretch. Open yourself to new experiences. Put yourself somewhere where the unexpected can happen and move slowly enough to catch the details.

Henry Ford once said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

I fully agree and would add the immortal words of Robert Frost,

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

If you’ve never taken the road less traveled, perhaps today is the day. You never know what might happen. It may refresh you. It may challenge you. It will definitely surprise you. And most importantly, from that road you might be surprised just how easy it is to build yourself a beautiful life.