San Luis Obispo is a really nice town, and we had a bit of a walk around the downtown after dinner. No photos but some highlights were a nightclub called The Library (what? shhhh!) and an alleyway that was completely covered with chewing gum on the walls. Also there was a great coffeeshop called Kreuzberg, reminding me of the neighborhood where Mildred and I stayed in Berlin a long time ago. After breakfast we continued our drive south through a lot of farm country.
We didn’t really get any good photos of farming, but that’s totally our bad because there was a lot of it to see along the drive. So much food in the US is grown in California, and a surprising amount right along the coast. The farms are big but nowhere near as big as the corn and soybean megafarms that cover the midwest (esp Illinois). In the small town of Guadalupe we saw his unusual and closed storefront:
A little while later we came across Los Alamos (not to be confused with the national laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.) We stopped at a total treat of a bakery called Well Bread.
Then we drove on to Santa Barbara. We rented bicycles there and had a good ride and some good tacos, and I don’t think we took photos of any of it. Oops. Then it was on to Ventura, where our friends Matt and Jen moved a couple of years ago. Here we are on their deck. Great friends, house and view!
We went stand up paddle boarding in Ventura Harbor, lots of fun!
Of course you can also sit down or kneel on a paddle board.
Matt and Jen also showed us around downtown Ventura and then we went back to their house for dinner and a fun evening of hanging out. We spent the night at their house and then the next morning they took us on a tour of the university where Matt works, California State at Channel Islands. The library where he works is a modern really nice building, surrounded by more of the Spanish-style architecture in the other campus buildings. It’s a new college, only 14 years old, and it’s on the site of a former mental institution! They are repurposing some of the buildings and building other new ones. A very shallow reflecting pool at the library is shown in the photo below in case you thought that was a mirage — water collecting on the ground in drought-stricken California!
This pizza place must be where the math majors hang out 🙂
We then drove through more farmland and the coast to Neptune’s Net for lunch. After that we watched some surfing action across the road from the restaurant then said good bye to Matt and Jen and headed toward Los Angeles!
The paddle boarding really looks like fun!