Along the coast (North)

On Mother’s day Lou and I found a bagel place near the beach for breakfast.  We sat out on at table on the sidewalk and ate our bagels, read the newspaper (Jay) and tour books (Lou).  We decided to head towards Santa Barbara, which is about 2 hours away.  See the map:

We headed north on Sepulveda and Route 1 which hugs the ocean.  Through Marina Del Rey and Santa Monica there was a lot of traffic, and it was just the standard, crowded LA road.  As we continued west towards Malibu, the traffic thinned out, and we could see the ocean more and more.  It was charming.  The pictures below were taken from a hill just north of Malibu, looking towards the city.

We also stopped at a farmers market and strolled along the stalls.

From there, we continued west towards Santa Barbara, stopping occasionally.  Near Point Mugu we saw this:

We continued on, but when driving through Oxnard, we kinda gave up.  Oxnard didn’t have much appeal. 

Lou has been wanting to visit a winery for some wine tasting since we got to CA, so we used the GPS to identify a winery.  Wrong – the first 3 places were either industrial parks or housing developments.  We finally wised up and used a smartphone to identify an actual winery on the internet and drove into a promising landscape, up some steep hills with tunnels and windy 2 lane roads.  We could see vineyards in the distance!

As we got closer, the sides of the road were crowded with parked cars.  We pulled in and found the valet parking and a crowded outdoor scene. I took these pictures at the end of our visit, after the place had cleared out a bit:

It was an attractive setting, but a bit too crowded, and, in jeans, we were both underdressed!  We got received a hard sell to join their wine club, which Lou resisted.  We each tried 4 wines, sat in the sun, listened to the music and watched the crowd.  It all felt a bit commercial, but it was a nice setting.  I thought maybe the crowd was related to Mother’s day, but no, they said it was crowded every weekend.

Going towards home we found a nice restaurant and had a Mother’s day dinner.  The kids both called to wish Lou a happy Mother’s day!  Well done kids!