June 22nd, 23rd Santa Barbara

June 22nd, 23rd Santa Barbara.

Driving towards Santa Barbara I felt a pang of sadness. Despite it's enormous size we'd somehow managed to run out of America to drive across. I still felt the road trip momentum, I still wanted to keep moving, try more places and, unusually for me, I was nowhere near ready to return to bonny Scotland. However we weren't over yet! and mentally reviewing our journey so far I drifted into Santa Barbara with a satisfied smile.

In Santa Barbara we had the immense good fortune to be staying in what can be best described as tasteful opulence. We were staying with Devon's parents. Devon's physicist father had started a Infared detector company at some point, had done rather well out of it and bought an old, run down, spanish style villa with grounds to do up. Well they done it up alright, it's now a *gorgeous* tastefully decorated villa complex based around a central courtyard. It comes complete with stables, six horses, riding area, wine cellar, guest house, easy access to a pool etc etc and some cool pets. It's also in the same sealed community as Oprah's place, and it looks much cooler than her's. Within hours I had a whole new desire to be incredibly wealthy.





In our infinite wearyness and lazyness the only real event we managed to attend whilst here was a parade celebrating the summer solstice. The parade was pretty big and watchable enough for a while, but Edinburgh's Beltane celebrations completely blow it out of the water. Also, despite promises of nudity and cavorting none was evident and no-one was even carelessly chucking around cans of fuel and matches! Interestingly though the parade did seem to confirm the odd sort of alternative lifestyle vibe that I'd been kind of getting in Santa Barbara, and despite and this being a very posh and expensive place to live there's still a few hippies managing to cling on.



The rest of our time was pleasantly spent eating, recuperating by the pool, cruising downtown for food and beers and chatting with Devon's family and friends. Steven (Devon's father), Brenna (Devon's sister) and Kathryn (Brenna's friend) were all really gracious hosts and looked after us well. Their sharp, combatorial and sarcastic conversations were a welcome return to a more British (In my mind anyway) mode of speech that I found I had been missing this a little during our travels.





Ah, I also went swimming in the Pacific. I think this is my first time swimming in an ocean. It turns our they're big, cold, and are fun to use for swimming, sort of the opposite of small, heated lead weights.

So Santa Barabara, or more specifically Devon's parents house/family, was a really, really pleasant place to spend a couple of days, and with our batteries suitably recharched we got ready to depart for Los Angeles.