"Soon" Is A Relative Term, Isn't It?

In between eating lunch twice at La Super-Rica, I drove down to the beach and went for a lengthy stroll.

It was a clear, sunny day, and a couple of hardy souls were braving the March weather by going parasurfing (or, as the link calls it, "kite-boarding"). Suffice to say, it's a sport that involves hooking up a very large kite to your body and then strapping a board to your feet and letting the wind take you where it will; This is the first time I'd ever seen it, though, in retrospect, it does seem like an obvious thing to do (actually, a computer-generated Pierce Brosnan did it in this film).

The storms that had lashed Southern California (due to el niño, or so I'm told) had left their mark on this beach in the form of a few boats that had been washed up and abandoned, not to mention some other bits of flotsam.

One thing that quite visible from the Santa Barbara beach are a number of very large off-shore oil-drilling rigs. While non-Californians tend to associate the Golden State with the entertainment industry (I'm faintly puzzled by how movie-making can be considered an 'industry' (indeed, the phrase 'service industry' is a bit troubling) since everyone involved in the making of entertainment is a craftsman, artisan, or artist of one sort or another) or Silicon Valley, California is a major oil-producing state (according to one source I found, third in the US behind Texas and Alaska). It's also has the largest agricultural sector in the US, and has a large presence in the defense and aerospace industries. It was a bit jarring to see the hulking, shadowy oil rigs off the peaceful and sunny coast, though...

While I was photographing a early 80's rock band those seagulls, I completely misjudged how deep the surf was and managed to get my feet completely soaking wet.

So, wet feet and all, I took a 25-cent shuttle to downtown Santa Barbara. It's full of charming spanish-style buildings and medium-to-high-end chain stores as far as the eye can see. In short, it's an outdoor mall (though, to be fair, I live across the street from a Banana Republic, so stone, meet glass house). It's hard to describe, but the city is utterly charming (I think the fact that it was gloriously sunny helped). It's a very short shuttle ride, and I had been in New York, I probably would have walked, but then again, my shoes were wet.

I found myself up in the clocktower of the Santa Barbara Courthouse, staring out over a vast sea of spanish tile roofs, looking at the office workers playing frisbee in on the lawn, wondering just what exactly the lifestyle of a Santa Barbara lawyer would be like. This line of entirely counter-productive thought was exacerbated by walking past the modest, charming one-story Santa Barbara College of Law. Visions of studying property while lying on the beach danced through my head.

Having successfully fought off that temptation, I took the 25-cent shuttle back to the beach, where I'd parked, and then drove back to La Super-Rica for lunch, again.

After a very satisfying meal (if memory serves, #16 with a Snapple), I headed back out on the road--101 up to San Luis Obispo.