Day 125 – 1/2/21 Santa Barbara and Malibu, CA

We explored Santa Barbara and Malibu today.

I had a good night of sleep, went to bed early and was up around 630am with back pain, likely from laying too long.  It is nice to be at a regular house, so I took an awesome hot shower and got ready to go early.  I had some posts to write as the last two days I just put down the highlights.  We were planning on leaving between 9 and 10, to go north to Santa Barbara and come back down as far as we could, while checking out the coast taking our time.  Once we were done for the day, plan was to go back to the trailer.

After I got ready, I went upstairs to write and use the computer.  I paid some bills and got a few online things organized.  Carol and Alex were up next, and got things going with breakfast.  Everyone else was up after, and almost all showed up at the same time.  I finished what I was doing and put the computer away, got a few things organized downstairs, and went up again.  We all chatted as we prepared and had breakfast, it was a great morning.  It was hard to get going to leave, we were all having a nice chat after breakfast, but I wanted to see a few things yet, so I got up and went downstairs to finish getting what I could ready.  Carol eventually went down and finished packing, and we were ready to leave almost around noon.  It was a bit hard to say bye, but we did and left towards Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara is pretty cool.  It is an old town, with Spanish architecture, clean, pretty nice and well kept up.  We walked around for a while, we had found parking near an entrance to the main street, I think it’s called State Street.  That street was closed off for cars, so there were people walking, biking, skating, etc.  Super nice area, full of history.  There are lots of trees, palm trees and such as well, mixing nicely with the Spanish architecture.  We found a Brazilian restaurant that had coxinha, so we got some before we headed back.  Definitely a neat place to visit in the summer, and just stop and have some drinks there, people watch and walk around.  We all liked it very much.  After just about an hour walking around, we went back to the truck, and drove towards the ocean to check that out.  The beach looked full, lots and lots of people walking around, biking etc.  We were not planning on getting out, just driving around, so we kept going.  Both downtown and by the beach we saw a good number of people not wearing masks… yikes… it’s still not sinking in.  And the way the beach area looked so full and packed of people into the walk ways, just didn’t look right.

From there we drove towards Malibu, via PCH1, that way we could see the coast line and check out Malibu.  I had not been to these areas before, the furtherst north I had gone from LA was Santa Monica, so this area was all new to me.   We saw lots of nice coastal areas on the way, but only made a quick stop at one when Bella said she wanted to take a picture.  Lots of areas with many surfers, some areas with campers parked on the side of the road, pretty cool.  Lots of people waiting to watch the sunset, which was approaching.  We got to El Matador Beach, which is the first one we wanted to stop at in Mailbu. 

The beach access was pretty packed, we had to park on the street a bit far from the entrance, and then walk there, crossing a pretty busy road.  From the road, we get to a trail-ish path to get down to the beach, and which has awesome views as you go down.  The beach has amazing views with rocks, and an amazing sunset.  There are huge mansions on the mountain hills across the street, overlooking the ocean.  Very pretty area.  Carol and I got lots of great pictures of the sunset.  The girls enjoyed the sand and exploring some small caves.  We stayed for a little over an hour, until the sun was pretty much gone.  Beautiful place. 

We will restart tomorrow from here and continue to Santa Monica, and hope to finish with Venice Beach.  We walked back to the truck, and by time we were up the path it was dark, so we had to cross that busy road in the dark… a little nervous, but we made it, and made it fun.  The drive from there was fine, lots of canyon roads to get to the main roads, and then one highway feeding into the next.  It took us about 90 minutes to make it back to the trailer.  There was heavy traffic flow when we hit the main highways, signaling what’s to come if we drive during the week.  It won’t be too fun.

We picked up pizza in town before heading to the trailer.  When we got home, we ate, then unloaded the truck, everyone took showers, we got things organized and then watched some TV.  I’m surprise the internet works for that some days, somehow.  The free internet here is fine for exchanging messages, but usually not for loading pictures or anything like that, but for some reason it works ok for streaming movies… I’ll take it though…. Bella made an outfit with plastic bags hahahaha very cool and funny. We watched 2 movies then went to bed.  We were all tired and I wanted to make sure we didn’t go to bed too late, so we can have an early start tomorrow.  We ended up going to bed around 11.

It was a nice day exploring Santa Barbara and Malibu.

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