It’s time to leave Hollywood this morning and drive on up the coast to Santa Barbara for an overnight stop. Checked out of our Motel 6. It cost £97 for two nights.
A short drive away from Los Angeles is Santa Monica and really it’s just a suburb of Los Angeles not far from Hollywood but it’s a coastal resort and turns out to be very attractive. Lovely sandy beaches and a pier, not too crowded and with a definite holiday seaside atmosphere.
We spent about two hours there, walking along the beach in cold, breezy conditions. I bought the usual small (bucket-sized) coffee and we ate our lunch on the pier. It was while we were having our lunch that Sophia suddenly realised that she’d managed to lose her sun glasses which she’d borrowed from her younger sister without telling her. She spent the rest of the time trying to find a new pair that looked exactly like the lost ones so she could replace them when she got home without her sister noticing.
I nearly bought something from “Wetzel’s Pretzels” just so I could have a paper bag with the name on and we passed a burger chain called “Fatburger”. What a great name eh? No hidden agenda there then.
We got back to the car and moved on. We’re taking Highway 1 which runs along the coast through Malibu and in the direction of Santa Barbara. Highway 1 is what they call a “divided highway”, like a dual carriageway but with three lanes instead of two. Malibu seems to stretch on and on forever and seems to consist of miles and miles of beach with beach huts and restaurants along its frontage. I realised afterwards that the beach huts are not beach huts at all but the beach homes of the people rich enough to own a beach house in Malibu. There are apparently 26 miles of perfect sandy beach designated as Malibu so plenty of room to sun bathe. We stopped briefly here and stumbled upon a coastal nature reserve housing colonies of pelicans.
After Malibu came Camarillo, Ventura and finally after turning on to Highway 101 we reached Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is even posher and nicer than Santa Monica. It appears to be a very select holiday resort used by the rich as a holiday retreat and as it was getting quite late by now we booked into a motel. The motel had a small pool and Pauline, Emma and Sophia had their first (cold) swim of the holiday. We needed something to eat and drove around until we saw a sort of big shack with queues of people outside. We were obviously not still in the expensive touristy part of Santa Barbara and it turned out to be an authentic Mexican eating place. It seemed so popular we had to go in. Although most of the people were queuing for takeaways they did have a dining area at the back but it was very basic. They hadn’t spent much on tables and chairs, no tablecloths, just Formica tables and you collected your order and just sat down where you could. The food was excellent and we ate it with plastic knives and forks. The whole evening was one of the cheapest so far, very good value for money. On the way back home we stopped at a genuine Mexican supermarket, my quick observational skills told me we were in the Mexican quarter somehow and we bought some cans of Mexican beer. You couldn’t buy anything that wasn’t Mexican in there. The only thing that wasn’t Mexican was the proprietor who looked Mexican but turned out to be Russian.
I heard a typical example of American silly-speak today on the radio. Someone was discussing something or other and suddenly said, “OK well let’s just walk the conceptual dog for a second.” How about that one? As you probably guessed it means something like “let’s just explore this a bit further shall we?”
Dear oh dear.
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