cali trip: day 2, part 2

Welcome back to your online vacation! Before we hit the road again, I have what I thought would be some exciting news concerning this blog. As I am sure you know, if you bothered to wait for this page to load, my site is ridiculously slow. It has become increasingly frustrating to me, so this weekend I finally did something about it and called my hosting company. They got my hopes up real high when “Michael” told me it was an easy switch to a different, same-price plan that would allow me to share more servers with fewer people. Faster, right? No. Not as of this morning. The homepage took me forty seconds to load. Eww. So while I can’t really promise that I can figure out how to fix it soon, at least you know I’m thinking about it, and if it’s frustrating to you, it’s infinitely more-so to me. Let’s forget our problems and the snow falling outside and look at pictures of sunshine! Here’s where we left off:

On the road to Santa Barbara, CA! Did you know there were pretty, snow-capped mountains on the other side of the road? This is a kind of snow I am ok with. The kind that has dusted a mountain off in the distance, and doesn’t affect my weather in any way. Eventually, we made it to our destination, where I allowed myself an I’m-on-vacation-and-not-on-a-diet coffee and cookie dough ice cream! OK, I’m never on a diet. I eat stuff like this all the time. My diet is sharing my ice cream with my hubs. That way we’re bi-winning. 🙂 Oh Charlie Sheen…I couldn’t resist.

So I’ve been telling everyone how amazing this town is. So pretty. We were wishing we would have planned to stay the night there instead of drive back to L.A. that night. We walked around the boardwalk-ish sidewalk that borders the harbor and roamed through stalls of local artists with their work set up on the grass, let our mouths water and our appetites grow with the anticipation of fresh seafood for dinner, and drove up through the town a bit to see the old, Spanish-style mission.

We ate the seafood I’d been craving all afternoon at Brophy Bros. which sits right on the harbor, surrounded by this:

Yummy. Both the food and the view. And with that delicious bowl of clam chowder, we were on the road again. We B-lined it back to our beach, so we could be there just as the sun was going down. We arrived right on time (and avoided the $8 parking for the second time that day with a little curb-side action)! Both my camera and I were drooling over the gorgeous light that was hitting these rocks. I love the haziness of this one.

David turned out some rockstar shots with the point-and-shoot. Like this one:

I thought this was so very NOT Midwest. Stumbling upon a beachy, sunset fashion photo shoot, that is. I am pretty sure that has never happened in Nebraska. What IS Midwest is that David and I wanted to sneak into the background of their photos and show off our modeling moves and make “tourist faces”. I am full of double standards like wanting to blend in, but thinking that would have been funny.

Again, I want to live here, on a pink beach.

And to finish off our lovely, long day, we kicked back at our hotel and caught the last fifteen minutes of the Oscars, which were happening just a short drive away. Talk about the disappointment of my trip – not seeing any celebrities because they were busy doing the most celebrity thing they could think of. It’s difficult to keep myself from writing a blog post all about it. Foreshadowing?

Day 3 tomorrow!