Santa Barbara

We woke up and quickly went outside to see the harbor in the early morning light. This whole being on EST things works out well for having early mornings without the sleepiness! 

Morning boat checks

We'd heard great things about Santa Barbara so we packed up and hit the road to have breakfast on the beach at a place I found on TripAdvisor. We were not disappointed! We took seats right by the beach and enjoyed watching little guys learn to bodyboard and pups run around.

Breakfast with a VIEW! 

We enjoy long walks on the beach...

Gorgeous beach

10 years and still going strong!

Big waves!

The locals we met on the beach kept telling us how it was not usually this warm in mid-November so we'd lucked out. We totally agreed. It was a wonderful time hanging out on the off-leash dog beach!

Finally found a coffee big enough...

We finally left the dog beach to go explore Santa Barbara's downtown. It was really well done. We were a little disappointed that it was just a cool presentation of stores you already have at home, but it was fun to walk around for a bit and soak it all in nonetheless.

Pre-hike excitement

We read about a great in-town hike so we meandered through neighborhoods of million dollar houses to get to this trail. We met some friendly folks along the way, but for the most part the trail was ours. I mention this because I had to pee and there were no restrooms so the lack of people came in handy. ;) I'm getting pretty good at "peeing in the woods."

At the top exhaustion

Inspiration point lived up to its name 

This was super steep going down
It was ZERO fun.

The hike was fairly simple except that one part went straight up. That's not a problem going up. Going down, though, is much harder for me now. My knee is not strong enough to stabilize itself so it gets weak and then my hip gets weak and it is all very painful. In hindsight I should have stayed at the bottom but I'm stubborn and I didn't want to miss out!

We decided we'd better get on the road so that we did not miss sunset on the beach like we'd planned. We made it to Pismo Beach to see a cloudy but still lovely sunset. The town itself wasn't quite our style as it was pretty touristy so we didn't stay long before heading up to San Luis Obispo ("SLO"). 

Pismo Beach

Pismo again

We loved our hotel in SLO as they upgraded us to a suite and its location was ideal. The downtown area of SLO was incredible. We loved it. It was a great college town (home of Cal Poly). We stopped into a local pub for dinner because they had live music being played which is a personal favorite of mine. The performers even let you text in song requests so I, naturally, requested they play "Hotel California" since we were in Cali and all. When they played it I was elated and quickly took them a $5 tip for helping make my night a great one.

That was about enough activity for one day so we headed back to the room for the night. Jackson got to watch the end of the Indiana basketball game and they beat Kansas so he was elated. I think the poor kid misses having cable at home! ;) It was a wonderful day and we are off to spend our Saturday exploring Big Sur.