Santa Barbara

Last Sunday (not the most recent one, but the one before that), two of the other girl interns and I went on a day trip to Santa Barbara. It was about 1.5-2 hours north of the South Bay (where I live, which is about 10 minutes south of LA). I had arranged for us to go on a 2-hour horseback ride along a ridge overlooking the ocean. It turned out to be a beautiful (seriously, perfect!) day.

This is Rosie (in the blue on the white horse) and Sheila (behind Rosie on the brown horse) in the corral before we started. The girl in front of them was also on our ride. She was about 13 years old and there with her grandfather. You could tell she was a little nervous throughout the ride.

This is me in the corral on my horse, Ivan. He reminded me of a horse I used to ride called Brick, but Ivan was much nicer! (Brick was the only horse to ever bite me, and yet, I was "saddled" with him for at least a year. By the end, we definitely had an understanding.)

A shot of Ivan from the saddle. :-)

This is near the beginning of the ride, as we wound our way up some mountains. You can kind of see part of the ranch beyond the trees. It was an enormous ranch. We found out as we were leaving that Brad Pitt owns the house across the street. Unfortunately, he is hardly ever there. :-(

More photos of us winding up through the mountains. That is Sheila in front of me, then Rosie, then the guide. He was from Utah and imparted lots of knowledge about the area, including things about the plants we were seeing. He pointed out these plants called Century Plants that only bloom once every 100 years. Lucky for us, there were 3 in bloom! He also pointed out fennel for us, which we chewed on and it tasted like black licorice.

Us on our various horses. The guide took Rosie and Sheila's cameras, so some of these photos are from Rosie's camera. When I get Sheila's, I will add them as well.

A few views of the beautiful coastline and ocean. The water was so blue!

This is the Gaviota Coast, just north of Santa Barbara.

After winding through the mountains, we made our way up to this lookout point where there were nice views of the ocean. If visibility had been better, we would have been able to see the Channel Islands. We could barely make out the outline of the nearest island.

Us at the lookout point. I'm the one on the far left.

This was a little corral they had at the lookout point. This is the view back towards the mountains.

Now we made our way down along the ridge, with gorgeous views of the coast. Video is below.

We eventually came back down towards the ranch and here we are riding along some pastures near the coast. Here I saw all these little creatures running around that looked kind of like squirrels, but not quite. Turns out they were squirrels called ground squirrels. They looked and acted kind of like squirrels on crack. They were much smaller and skinnier than squirrels back home (unlike the squirrels in Ann Arbor which are like giant squirrels!) and ran around quickly and erratically. They were one of the few wild creatures I have seen out here. But we did also see a deer on this ride and mountain lion tracks, but no mountain lion.


Then we went into this avocado grove, which was awesome! It was like riding through giant magnolia trees. And they smelled kind of like eucalyptus - kind of minty. Unfortunately, the video got choppy for some reason when I put it through the Windows Movie Maker software. :-( But if you see me when I have my laptop with me, I can show you the actual video from my camera.

Me in the avocado grove.

Our guide hitting the sign for the ranch as we rode home.

They were selling shirts and hats at the ranch that were actually adorable! So each of us bought a shirt. Mine is long-sleeved. They all had this pattern on the back. I just loved the cowboy on the horse with his surfboard.

So, the ride was awesome! It was gorgeous, informational, relaxing, on a horse (!), and only took my body a week to recover. :-)

After the ride, we drove down into Santa Barbara and walked around. We walked down the main street to the pier. This was one of the buildings we saw. The whole town had this French riviera feel to it and everything was adorable.

Well, maybe not everything. We walked by a parking lot and this car was in it. We have no idea what it was except maybe used at Halloween. Can you see all the cloves of garlic in the front window on the dash?

Rosie, Sheila, and I at the entrance to the pier.

There were all these fisherman at the end of the pier.

Then we ate dinner at the rooftop portion of a restaurant on the pier. Apparently, the staple of this place was peanuts that you grabbed from buckets by the bar. So before our dinner came, we had peanuts and beer. But as we sat there, the table behind us celebrated a birthday. They had brought a homemade cake that just looked unlike any other cake I had seen. It had pink frosting with sprinkles. I pointed it out to Sheila and next thing you know, the birthday girl graciously offers us a piece. How could we say no? It was strawberry cake and the girl's little sister had "made" it (she was about 6 years old, so I'm sure she had help from mom). It was delicious! So we thought we had a very interesting mixture of food. Hence, the photos of beer, cake, and peanuts. :-)

After dinner and a nice sunset, we made our way back down to LA. There was some traffic from rubbernecking to slow us down, but then we made it back okay. I find the rubbernecking in LA to be worse than anyplace else I have been. In DC, it's like traffic jams will happen for no reason at all. Out here, they happen because people are looking at something that does not affect them whatsoever. I haven't decided which one I think is worse. In this case, one time, people were looking at some cop cars who pulled someone over on the road next to the highway. The second time was from people mesmerized by a huge fire in a torch that some establishment had put up as decoration.

All in all, it was a great trip and I would love to go back sometime!