Santa Barbara is home to Westmont College and San Francisco is home to University of San Francisco. Certainly both cities are home to other schools as well, but those are the ones on our list. The folks at Westmont sure do love the Westmont Fountain. We found that Chris and Katy enjoyed visiting this college. They’d go back if they were invited.
After leaving the college we headed for Hearst Castle en route to San Francisco. It was fascinating to hear about how the castle was built and how life was after it was built. It was at the Hearst Castle Visitors Center that I made the worst error of the trip. It looked to me as though it was much better to head north on Highway 1 than back south to where we could head east to catch 101.
Front Gate
Dining Room
Billiard Room Ceiling
Swimming Pool Windows at Hearst Castle
Swimming Pool
Animals between Guest Center and Hearst Castle
What the map didn’t say was that it would be very slow and, that through Big Sur, the road would force us to go at virtually walking speed even without traffic. It only added a couple hours to our trip. It was very pretty until the sun went down. So, once again we managed to find our way to our beds in the dark.
Los Angeles to Santa Barbara sounds like a West Coast sort of trip and there are colleges to visit on both ends. Sunday morning took us to the campus of the University of California – Los Angeles. Cool, I have wanted to visit since I was thinking about college. Since we were already expecting to be on our own, we found parking and began wandering around. UCLA is bigger than ASU and much bigger than Fort Lewis.
Royce Hall
Stairs at UCLA Campus
Royce Hall Fountain
Inverted Reflection in the Royce Hall Colonade
Reflection in the Royce Hall Colonade
After UCLA we took a little trip over to Pepperdine in Malibu. We didn’t really tour the campus, but we did drive around the loop and
Pool at Getty Villa
they have a beautiful campus with an amazing view of the ocean. Visiting Pepperdine set us up nicely for visiting the Getty Villa. Dee and the girls liked it better than I did and I rather liked it. I was probably still in a testy mood from negotiating that parking lot that Californians call Highway 1 or the Pacific Coast Highway. I should have learned then that Highway 1 would let you down.
Avoiding Highway 1 near Los Angeles was on my mind heading for Santa Barbara.We went into the hills from Malibu until we could join US101. Santa Barbara is a beach town too so it’s impossible to stay away from ‘The One’ altogether, but we were in good shape because
Carpinteria Best Western
we were further from Los Angeles. We actually had a place to stay in Carpenteria, the city east of Santa Barbara. The hotels we stayed at were mostly just nice, but I liked this one particularly well since it had an enclosed courtyard and a balcony that we enjoyed while drinking our morning coffee. That’s jumping the gun though, on Sunday evening we dumped our bags in our rooms and took the girls to the beach in Carpenteria. We took Linden Avenue until it ended in a parking lot and walked a few yards to the sand. The girls looked left and right and said goodbye so Dee and I were on our own. We hollered that they should call us when they were hungry and we went to The Palms for dinner. It’s a bit unusual in that you cook your own meat. We were almost done when the girls called, so by the time they walked the couple blocks from the beach, we were ready to go across the street to the grocery store . Chris was tired of ‘Gringo Food’ (whatever that is) and wanted to make some Guacamole dip for dinner for herself and Katy. It was more than Avocado. I had a taste the next morning and this gringo would happily call it food!
