You're in for a real treat, Zippy!
I just returned from 3 days of riding around SLO, Paso, Avila & Los Osos and it was stellar! Unfortunately my camera battery pooped out, so I didn't get many pictures, but I'll post the few I did get. I got really, really lucky with the weather.
There is a great, but unfinished bike path from Avila Beach (I think it was called the Bob Evans Path?) heading inland toward SLO. And from that, you can take the frontage road to SLO, which is just about the coolest bicycling town this side of Portland.
My hotel in SLO was right across the street from Cambria Bikes on Monterey Ave., and the chamber of commerce has produced a FREE cyclo-tourist map of the area with a large map of the whole region and smaller maps of each town.
Every Thursday night is the SLO farmer's market, and it's quite the festival. Such a cool town.
If you're feeling ballsy enough to do a little climbing, take See Canyon up to Prefumo Canyon Road, back to SLO. About a mile of it is unpaved, but easily manageable with a road bike. Climbing up Prefumo Canyon was harrrd in places, but it was a real treat to climb up out of the clouds and fog. Even if you don't ride all the way through, there are a bunch of apple orchards along See Canyon. The smell of rotting apples along the road really puts one in the mood for hard cider, but neither of the orchards I stopped at had any hard cider. When going back on Prefumo, there were places where the descent was so steep, releasing the brake levers made you feel like a bullet being shot out of a gun.
If you're in Paso (which is not as bicycle-friendly as SLO) and feel like splurging on a meal for your wife, I give Bistro Laurent two enthusiastic thumbs way up! It wasn't cheap, but the food was truly memorable. They get their chantarelle mushrooms fresh from some mushroom hunter around Big Sur. Each course comes paired with a wine, and the sauces were so good I ordered one of my courses as the dessert.
Have fun!