On the second day of our trip (Saturday), we woke up and went to breakfast in a little surfing town called Summerland. We took a detour there and drove past all sorts of fancy areas of Santa Barbara (like Hope Ranch where Oprah lives) and downtown Montecito where celebrities are often spotted. (We didn't see any, but that might be because we didn't walk around looking for any.) Once in Summerland, we ate breakfast at an adorable little restaurant called Summerland Beach Cafe.
(I had "crab cake eggs Benedict" where there's a crab cake instead of Canadian bacon. SO GOOD but I'm pretty sure I gained 3 pounds during that meal alone...)
After breakfast, we headed over to Stearns Wharf in downtown Santa Barbara.
I didn't get a good picture of the wharf as a whole, but just imagine a HUGE dock that cars can drive on. There are also several restaurants and shops on this dock as well.
As we started walking on the wharf, there were lots of signs explaining things that you can't have or do while on the dock. One thing that is not allowed are high heels:
Something that is interesting and slightly scary is that there are no rails to make sure people don't fall into the ocean....
I wouldn't really get anywhere near the side of the dock for fear that I would lose my balance.
Just a few cute pictures from the dock:
We did a little shopping on the wharf, then decided to REALLY be tourists and take a water taxi to the other side of the town. Our water taxi was super cute---it's called the "Lil' Toot" and had bubbles coming out the top of it.
While on the Lil' Toot, we got an up-close look at a seal trying to get fishermen to throw fish to him. (He was super cute!) We also learned that a Californian Pelican's head gets whiter as it gets older. So we knew, if we saw one with a brown head, it was really young. (We saw TONS of herons, pelicans and sea gulls in the few minutes that we were on the little boat.)
Once off the boat, we walked down a really long pier and saw DOLPHINS!!! I didn't get a good picture of them, unfortunately, but it was so cool!! There must have been over a dozen dolphins swimming about 100 yards from us. It was exciting!!
Here's a neat picture taken from the roof of the Maritime Museum:
This is only HALF of the boats docked in this area. My camera wouldn't capture all of them.
The nice elderly lady working at the lookout above the museum was more than happy to take a picture of us from up there:
This would have been the perfect place to get a few great shots of the "American Rivera" in Santa Barbara, but, alas, it was too hazy to see much of anything up near the mountains. Maybe next time!!
We then did a little bit of shopping on State Street, which is the higher-end downtown shopping of Santa Barbara.
After all of the walking and sight-seeing that we did, we were ready for a night of relaxation, so we rented movies and ate pizza. Hey, we've got to have some down-time when we're on vacation, right??
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