travel diaries : California day three

Edit: be sure to check back next week for the budget details and tips from our trip in California. We love to vacation but hate to spend all of our money on it, so we try to be creative! I'm sharing those tips with you next week, so be sure to come back! 

On our third day in California, Mark and I made the 30 minute drive up to Santa Barbara to generally enjoy the city.  Our first stop was super exciting : we went to drive around UC Santa Barbara. I KNOW, super exciting, right?! Luckily I married someone that likes exploring college campuses. I'm not sure what it is, and we never talk about why, but we like seeing what other colleges are like! I guess we are doing research for our future kids? Not sure. We've seen Texas State, UT, LSU, Tulane, UCSB, and UCLA, which (spoiler alert) we drove around on our last day. I'm sure we've seen more together, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.  We concluded that Mark would have liked UCSB but I didn't really like it too much. My main complaint is that the buildings didn't match. I got kind of spoiled by Texas Tech... :)

After our driving tour around UCSB we headed down to the beach to park and walk around the area and through Stearn's Wharf. It was super pretty down here and very clean! We also noticed lots of foreigners, especially British, that we hadn't seen or heard until then. I guess Santa Barbara is pretty big with the tourists!

We parked by Sambos, where we later had lunch!

We stopped and enjoyed some ice cream on the wharf and found a couple postcards to add to our traveling collection. After that we got back in the car and did a little driving tour to see the sights in Santa Barbara. There are some really nice houses and BEAUTIFUL views. Seriously, so gorgeous, almost European-feeling views. 

After our little drive, we headed back to where we had parked (hey, it was free parking and we knew the patio would have a good view) and headed to lunch at Sambos. It was super picturesque with it's yellow umbrellas and the weather was perfect in the mid '70's. Mark got fish and chips and I sprung for the grilled cheese with fries. What can I say, I'm daring.

After lunch we walked around a bit and took in the pretty areas of Santa Barbara. The weather was gorgeous!

One of the main places I had to hit in Santa Barbara was the courthouse. I'm a horrible tourist and we didn't stop to read any plaques or anything but I know that this courthouse was built around 1930 and it's super awesome. That's all that needs to be said, right? It had amazing colonial Spanish details like tiles and paintings and lighting, it was so awesome. Seriously I gasped at every turn. See for yourself:

We had reservations for dinner that night that we were really excited, but we ended up canceling. As much as we LOVED Santa Barbara (really, we could see ourselves living there if we were kadrillionaires), we hadn't had much down time and knew we were leaving the next day to come home. At that moment dinner by the pool sounded like the best idea, so we drove back to Oxnard and got back around 5pm. We ended up hanging in the pool and hot tub for the rest of the night, then enjoying the sunset right outside of our hotel and room service for dinner. It was the best decision and I don't regret it at all!

(yes, Texans, these are what we call jackets)

It was a great day!