Terrible Rooms, Beautiful Gardens
We stay in Cambria several times every year. Usually we stay on Moonstone Beach at Blue Dolphin Inn, Sand Peebles, Fog Catcher, or, when we're looking for something less costly, at the Creekside Inn.
However, in July 2009, we decided to give Cambria Pines Lodge a try because it was one of the few places we had never stayed in the years we've been visiting Cambria. What a mistake. It was every bit as costly as the beach front properties with their excellent rooms, well appointed baths, good service, and wonderful views. But Cambria Pines Lodge is one of those places that has put all its money into how things look, not on how they function.
I can't understand why the Moonstone Corporation made the decision to construct such shoddy buildings.
The gardens surrounding the place are just fabulous. But the rooms? They were awful--and I mean truly awful! The buildings are constructed with the cheapest materials possible: the walls are paper thin, the floors shake so badly all the furniture rattles every time one walks across the room to use the very loud, cheaply constructed bathrooms. Also, there is loud music in the lodge on weekends and if you get a room far away enough from the noise, you will be put in the one of these outer buildings with names like Rose Wood, that are the cheapest, shoddiest constructions of all.
We ate dinner in the restaurant. The wine we ordered had corked. They replaced it, but recommended their Castoro house wine as a replacement promising it was very good--It wasn't, it was about as bad an ordinary restaurant house wine as we've had. The Chicken Piccata was breaded and cooked with tomatoes and pickled artichoke hearts with a few capers thrown in, so it should be called something like Tuscan Chicken (or something equally as unidentifiable) because this certainly was not Chicken Piccata.
We paid almost as much as if we'd stayed at on the beach with a partial and lovely ocean view and rooms that have fireplaces, are soundproofed, and have lovely bathrooms.
Go to Cambria Pines Lodge to walk the gardens, go for the "happening weekend music scene", maybe even go to the bar for the very-hard-to-find late night fare, but don't go for an overnight stay.