Located on the "American Riviera", Santa Barbara is a tourist-friendly mid-size city with plenty of beaches, restaurants and Central Coast culture. In the past we probably would have passed right by, but now Carley's Aunt Annette and Uncle George live there.
This photo was taken without permission from Santa Barbara's Wikipedia page, since it was too foggy when we were there to get any photos like this. 
Annette met us at the Beach Grill at Padaro, an inviting restaurant with good seafood lunches, plenty of outdoor seating, and a sandbox play area that Rowan enjoyed digging into.
After lunch, we got a tour of Annette and George's beautiful new house, complete with a vegetable garden. Those tomatoes and squash look much better then the ones in our garden in Mississippi!
"This is much better than my toy piano!"Unfortunately we didn't get to see George, since he was playing in a golf tournament. After a few hours in Santa Barbara, it was time to roll on up the coast to...
Pismo Beach
So the sun was nowhere to be seen while we were in Pismo, thanks to the marine layer fog that is common along the Pacific coast. If it hadn't been for the fog, it certainly would have looked more like this photo we took from some random website about Pismo Beach:
Big thanks to our friend Mike Gruver for offering up his pad. It was great to go out for some good sushi, hear each other's Jazzfest stories (Mike's got some great ones), and enjoy some premium Grateful Dead concert footage (View from the Vault III: Shoreline 6/16/90 - with possibly the most epic Terrapin ever) on the sweet home theatre system. 
Once again we forgot to take any photos, so this one is a blast from the past: Mike at our San Francisco wedding party, two-and-a-half years ago, with Craig (left) and Bridget. (And there are lots more of those photos at that link.)It being a weekday, Mike had to go be at work early for the city of Pismo Beach, so we made our way on up the coast and into the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Next stops: San Jose and the Santa Cruz Mountains.
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