Beautiful Santa Barbara!

We headed out to Santa Barbara on Friday morning. We decided to do the coastal route rather than the Freeway because we like the ocean scenery. The drive took just over two hours, even though we had a slow down about 10 miles out of Santa Barbara so they could condense three lanes into one, so that six road workers could wander around aimlessly on the premise of doing roadwork. It doesn’t matter where you go, road crews always look the same to me…a whole lot of nothing going on.

We arrived at our motel in Santa Barbara (yep, motel!) and were able to check-in as our room was ready. The motel is a block from the beach, about $150 a night and newly renovated. It was actually much nicer than I expected. I wanted to be right down in the thick of things so went for location on this accommodation. Surprisingly, it was nicer than many hotels we have stayed in.

After we dropped our stuff in our room we headed out to find some lunch. We went to Stearn’s Wharf, which is the wooden pier down on the waterfront. It has a few restaurants and shops. We planned on walking the whole pier before deciding where to eat, but ended up being so hungry we just went into the first place we saw. We ate at Longboards, which is the upstairs patio restaurant that is more casual than the downstairs “traditional” restaurant.

 Lunch was delicious, drinks were STRONG, weather was sunny and the view was lovely. After lunch we walked a bit then headed back for a nap, which in my case may have had something to do with the strong drinks 😉

That night we decided to head for a walk up State Street, which is the main street where all the shopping and restaurants were. We quickly found a massage place called “Little Rainbow Foot Spa”. We peeked in the window (#1 Rule of massage places like this, if you can’t see in, don’t go in!) We could clearly see six beds out in the main area, and that a foot massage was $20. It didn’t take much deliberating before we decided to go in. They put us in a chair right away, covered our eyes with a towel, and that was that. It reminded us of Asia for many reasons. It was cheap (albeit not as cheap as Asia!), the beds were all out in one main room, and there was Chinese music playing. All in all it was very relaxing and we both enjoyed our massages and decided we would definitely be back the next day.

After our massage, it was late, and I needed some food. We found a pub just off the main street that looked good. The food was good, the wine was good, the service was okay… but when she took our credit card she disappeared for at least 15 minutes. That makes me nervous… so I don’t think I’d go back there. There are so many choices for restaurants here anyway. We spent the rest of the evening walking up and down main street looking at all the shops, restaurants and bars. It is a lovely town.

The next morning we decided to spend some time at the beach. The beach in Santa Barbara is nice, but not as nice as LA. 

I’m assuming if you had more time here you could drive and find many beaches around the area that would be the perfect California beach we’ve come to expect. This “nice” beach was a good place to read a book and enjoy the sunshine for the morning. We decided to try one of the many other restaurants for lunch and ended up at another pub. This one was also good… no worries about the credit card disappearing as you order and pay at the bar at this place.

As we walked out we noticed there were a couple of wine tasting rooms in the lane behind the pub. Yes, this seems like a good time to try this out 😁 (Honestly, there is no bad time for wine tasting). 

We chose the Kalyra one based on its cozy and very busy look. We found a place to sit at the bar. The large circular bar encompasses the room, seats about 30, and we managed to grab the last two seats and started our lovely wine tasting. I did the red and white (6 altogether) which was $10, and Steve just did the red (3 tastes) which was $6. 

There is not even an option to spit the wine out here (although why would you?) so 6 tastings was quite enough for me! The very cute wine server told us a little about each wine and the winery as we sampled. This was nice because she was incredibly busy serving all the customers on her own. I have no idea how she remembered who was on what wine! Steve and I decided that we need a place like this at home… and spent our time trying to figure out how to make it happen. In the end we deduced you need a lot of money to set up something like that! Money we don’t have, because we spend all of ours on travel, wine and chocolate 😉.

The cool thing about Santa Barbara is that there are tons of these places doing tastings right down in the town. We definitely want to come back and do more of this! (We don’t however recommend leaving your kids in the cars with the doors open like we saw one couple doing while they did their wine tasting… really?!?) We had plans to do another tasting later that day, but they are only open till 5 or 6 and we just didn’t make it. They should be open until 9! Just saying…

We finished our day with another nice cheap massage. Steve’s was better than mine this time, as my guy needed to cut his nails! Still you can’t really complain for a full hour massage for $30!

The next morning we took a nice little walk along the beachfront road because each Sunday they have an Art Walk. All kinds of artists (painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, etc.) have set up stands all along the beachfront avenue. It was much longer than I expected and the quality was quite good.

 

Usually we divide art into three categories:

1) Really good!

2) I could do that!!

3) WTF!!!

Most of this art fell into category number 1, which is a good thing!

After this we packed our bags and headed off to our next destination—Palm Springs.