Memorial Weekend in Santa Barbara!

I was so excited to have a little road trip by myself to go visit my dear friend Nicole in Santa Barbara for the long weekend. Nicole and I met in SF through Scott Edmonds (hiker Barrett's brother) about 2 years ago, but it seems a lot longer than that. It was a beautiful SF day on Friday when I left work early so I decided to take Highway 1 down along the coast for a bit of the drive and then hop over to the 101. Well... I managed to miss my exit to cut over and ended up cruising right though Carmel on the 1 and just decided to keep going. Such a georgous drive and really hard to fit into your schedule when planning a drive from SF to the L.A. area, so lucky me.

After a beautiful drive I hit Santa Barbara just as it was getting dark and found my way to Nicole's Hippy-Turd-Hold. The name given by her movers. It's really difficult to describe, but imagine the main road to the driveway of the house was taken out during a landslide years ago so there is a make shift dirt drive up a steep hill as the "new" driveway. Not in use during the rainy season, you must wear your rain boots and hike up. The neighbors pad is a barely visible and crumpled shack halfway down the hill, again due to landslides several years ago. And yes, she is in the infamous fire zone :( The charm of the hippy-turd-hole is it's expansive patio overlooking the hills of Santa Barbara, the fact that Nicole's room, once the living room, has a huge stone fireplace, a wall of windows with "the view" and a tiki bar :)

We were lucky to have a friend of Nicole's take us out for a sail the next day. Armed with my dose of dramamine it was a fantastic afternoon on the water! I was planning on it being much cooler out on the water as it usually is even in sunny Santa Barbara, but it was perfect in the sun. Sunday Nicole drove and showed me around, we went to the coolest place, an old stage coach stop which now has live music, a bar and they sell one kind of sandwich, tri tip. It was good... but I'm such a brisket girl I can't help it!! I will never understand why you would want to naw on thick cut, hard beef when you could have melt-in-your-mouth brisket! :P

We spent a lovely afternoon lazyin' it up on the beach where I showed Nic how to make a redneck beach recliner :) A couple down in front of us were staring and we couldn't figure out why until we saw they copied my sand recliner idea. I totally brought the redneck beach recliner to Santa Barbara! LOL