Santa Barbara, CA and wine country

The Farmer’s Market in downtown SLO is great – very busy, friendly and lots to offer.

Best artichokes and strawberries I’ve seen, like the other produce for sale here. Worth the risks of riding the bike up there - we ran into a rattlesnake and high winds, but had great parking.

If you know me at all, you know that food is one of my most favorite pastimes, and we did eat at Jockos in Nipomo, CA – a local must-eat restaurant. Lucky for us, even though there was a 1.5 hour wait, a friend filled Curtis in on the breezeway seating.
We were in and out before that time was up, being willing to sit in the hallway right next to the kitchen!

This whale welcomes you to Pismo Beach, and thankfully it’s unlike the other two we’ve heard of in the past two weeks – washed up dead on a shore. Sad.

Drove down to Santa Barbara via Solvang, CA. If you saw the movie Sideways, this is the area it took place. They had ostrich farms (no, we didn’t eat it) and a (touristy commercial) Danish village to walk around.

In Santa Barbara, we wandered around the harbor and State Street areas, where I had *excellent* sushi at East.

This picture is for Pam - HAD to find this campus!

Up Mountain Road, the view of the city and ocean were spectacular, and we saw two large coyotes or wolves – not sure which. Our hike was lush and green and in the clouds.

Although neither of us have a great desire or palette for wine, we figured that a Wine Tasting was in order as we looked around at our current location. And all the wine signs and ads didn’t hurt our persuasion, either. At Robert Hall Winery in Paso Robles, Allison was a great Wine 101 instructor for us. Though most weren’t fabulous for my taste buds, we did find two that were good. Funny, they were desert wines, and one had brandy added, go figure that’s the one that tastes good. She took us down in the caverns where there were thousands of barrels of wine (or potential taiko!) that we got to taste test.
There were huge vats of in-progress concoctions and women in dresses stomping on grapes. Ok, maybe the latter was just in my mind. Either way, it prompted US to buy wine - like - *good* wine, but like I said, we are not wine drinkers... hence our cups.