Saturday, August 25, 2007

The Road Home

In California if you have a ways to travel it can usually be as dull or entertaining as you wish depending on how much time you want to take. This time we opted for entertaining and went back via Santa Barbara and Monterey.

I did my undergrad degree at UCSB and I spent a total of 9 years there (it's a hard place to leave) and as a result have a fair bit of history there. Originally I wanted Terri and I to eat lunch at the famous Mexican food shack La Super Rica, but they were closed on Wed. This turned out to be quite fortuitous as then I tracked down where the Sojourner Cafe was, Some time ago the Soj was bought by a friend of mine Donna Mudge and I was thrilled to learn that not only did she still own it but that she was there that day. It was so cool to see her again, have her meet Terri, and spend a few minutes catching up (we of course exchanged contact info so we could continue the conversation when she's not working.) And the food was blissfully delicious. If you live near there I highly recommend it.

Since there is currently a major fire going on in the Los Padres forest Donna told me that she was telling others about our misadventures during the last major Santa Barbara fire. I stayed through that one and it's a whole blog entry on its own.

I also showed Terri what remains of La Conchita after a sizable part of the hillside came down on some of the houses there (very sobering sight), and where I used to live in Carpinteria and we walked out onto the beach there. There's an entire swimming area and ocean kayak rental place there now. I'm jealous. I swam there long before there was a swimming area and I would have loved to have a kayak available.

I also showed Terri Folk Mote Music though I was unsuccessful at trying to get her to buy a nice Kentucky Mandolin, and I showed her the elaborate Courthouse.

I also tried to find my old place in Goleta where I went through the fire, but was a block off so didn't succeed and we have to get going north to Monterey anyway.

With Monterey the series of happy accidents continued as we found a room at the Cannery Row Inn with a very gracious and helpful host named Mark who found us a place to eat at 9:30pm (Skooners - yum).

We then spent most of the next day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and it was fantastic as I haven't been there in years so I hadn't seen the new open water exhibits or the penguins. Blogger now features a video upload and we'll see if it works as I just love the video clips that I wound up with.

I tried uploading a video and it failed after uploading the entire thing. Guess I'll just put them on my site and put links in.

I need to do a run down of the fish in the Kelp Forest but that's a lot of work. Ones that you see are:
  • sturgeon
  • leopard shark
  • bat ray
  • chinook (king) salmon
  • rockfish of many kinds
  • 7 gill shark (the big ones)
  • spiny dogfish (looks like a sleek shark.)
  • anchovie school (the shimmering silver in the 1st Kelp Forest clip)

1 comment:

Elf said...

Next time you're in monterey, for some nice relaxed hiking and drop-dead gorgeous views, try Jack's Peak-- my photos from last weekend here .

-ellen again really I need to be doing some work