Santa Barbara

We went to Santa Barbara a few days before Thanksgiving, my first trip up there since I was a kid. On the way we spent a night in Ventura, right on the harbor with a nice view of the Channel Islands. We got some nice Malai Kofta at The Taj Cafe and walked around the town a little that night, then went on up to SB the next day. There's a nice walking tour of the older parts of town (built by the Spanish long ago) and we relaxed afterwards by going to see the new Harry Potter at the really cool Arlington Theater, a great old cinema that has indoor decor that looks like an old Mission at night. Movie was good, glad to see they're dumping more and more of the expository classroom stuff.

The next day we went to check out the Old Santa Barbara Mission, which was interesting historically but Princess Whitegoat was again noting how the displays don't look like they've been updated in the past 20 years. From there we went up into the really nice Santa Ynez valley to visit some wineries, accompanied w/ cheese & crackers from Trader Joe's. We got a taste of some Flying Goat wine (which we'd had before) but couldn't afford a whole bottle. We made our way down to Solvang, a weird town that is made to look like Denmark. While The Goat doesn't care at all for things Danish, we did find some Etke Gejtost there. It's an amazing cheese that we found in Norway last summer and lasted a whole year. I've deemed it the missing link between cheese and peanut butter. Later that night we watched Sideways, much of which takes place in Solvang and the surrounding wine areas.