I just realized I have gotten careless about blogging trips in California. So trying to catch back on some.
Santa Barbara is a city called the American Riviera and has been pretty famous for its scenic beaches though various TV shows and movies. So on a long weekend we decided to give this city a visit. This city is reachable by either taking Highway 101 S like for LA or by the Scenic Highway CA-1 route. We decided to take CA-1 as we had loads of time :) We did trip on the Martin Luther King weekend (Jan 16-18th).
Very soon on the way we hit the beaches in the Monterey county, which were pretty specially at the sunrise on a clear day. We kept moving the CA-1 highway deserves its name of being scenic. You will never get bored of the scenic beauty around you though the traffic is slower because of roads being narrower and sometimes winding. At someone it started raining and we decided to skip the CA-1 route and take a faster route to reach Santa Barbara (by popular vote, I was veto-ed :( )
Now to city SB, after reaching the city in afternoon, we visited the tourist center which is always a good place to get free maps and info about the city and buy magnets, t-shirts etc. As usual the map contained tons of places to visit but the person at the desk helped us decide what to do.
The two important buildings are the courthouse (with its Spanish style architecture) and the Queen of the Mission (of Santa Barbara). Turned out we were able to visit all of them by 4:00 PM and it was time to hit the beach. The water was cold as usual and no one was in it. We played Frisbee for some time besides walking a lot trying to get out own best shots of sunset.
The evening we took a walk around the downtown which definitely was better than Mountain view downtown with tons of clubs but being a long weekend there weren't many people around. and since others weren't interested in going to dance, we didn't (Gotta visit again, huh).
The stay was in motel six costing around 60 $ for the room.
Next day was spent in visiting California Six Flags adventure for my second time. The place was fun unlike I expected 3 years is a lot of time to have forgotten every thing and trying rides again was almost a new experience. Sadly it stared drizzling and raining mid way through the day, shutting down a few rides and closing the park early. Fortunately the guys informed that since they are closing the park early we get a free entry to visit again and also we faced shorter queues everywhere.
Third day we went to LA first visiting the Malibu beach which wasn't much fun with all the rain but was still pretty spot. Then we went to UCSC to pick up Nikhil and have a tour of the college. We left LA about 3-4 PM and were back in Mountain view by 11 PM.
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