Los Angeles to Santa Barbara (97miles about 1hr 45min)

We had provided ourselves with a kettle and several UKà USA adapters in order to produce cups of tea to nearer the required English standard; we had borrowed some milk from the Chinese restaurant the previous evening so we were able to start the day with a “cuppa” before checking out of the hotel. There was nothing to pay and I should perhaps mention here that our arrangements were faultless, every time we reached a hotel they were aware of the booking and took our voucher without any concern. We usually had to show picture ID and give in a credit card number for incidentals but often there were none of these added to the bill. In addition to the kettle we had purchased a card for the sat-nav so that we could use it in the USA, you can make your mind up which was the more essential item. We found it very useful to programme the device with the next hotel’s address and follow directions door to door, with the device set for the El Prado Inn in Santa Barbara we set off, we navigated flawlessly out of Los Angeles and basically followed one freeway, US-101 for 80miles, to Santa Barbara. We found the hotel easily and parked beneath it. We were able to check in earlier than allowed and took possession of a good sized room with a bed which could easily sleep four adults, we never tested this premise despite having beds of this size all over California, sometimes with two of them in the same room.
The hotel was a series of three storey blocks wrapped round an outside swimming pool. We walked down to the beach, bought lunch at Quisnos, a poor substitute for Subway, but you learn to make do. We walked out to the end of the pier and watched fishermen competing against pelicans for the available fish, not as I’ve tried to make you think, the rod and line v the graceful dive of the bird, the pelicans were quite content to let the humans do the work and then rob them of their catch either as they landed it or from their buckets. To be fair the humans seemed to retain most of their fish but it made an entertaining spectacle for the neutrals. From the end of the pier we were persuaded to take the water taxi round the harbour and paid $4 to do it. On our journey we passed less idle pelicans actually fishing for themselves and a yacht owned by David Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash, look up your Rock music history if no bell rings! We figured out that we had walked 11 blocks from the hotel to the beach and each block had up to 100 numbers in it, so if it’s the second block it starts at 200 and won’t go past 299. Anyway it was quite a long way back to the hotel in the heat of the day so we used the electric tram which took us just short of the hotel. Notice on this occasion we got things right, we walked down to the beach and rode back up! We had a laze in and around the pool before eating out close to the hotel, we ate at an Argentinean Restaurant and the meals were good, well-presented and huge. The first two aspects of our meals varied but the last one was almost constant every meal we bought at any, but one, restaurant would have fed both of us.