Freeway-Free in California – Santa Barbara by Pedal, Foot, and Trolley
With another day of 90+-degree heat threatening Ojai, we decide to head for the coast and the Queen City of Santa Barbara just thirty miles west. . We slide off Highway 101 on xxxx, the beach-front road which stretches the length of Santa Barbara beach from the tony Fess Parker Inn down to the harbor. We are a bit daunted by the slow flow of traffic, the hundreds of beach parasols, and the cars seeming to circle the pay parking lots, but Griselda – the-GSP-lady steers us to the far end of the harbor, where we score Free Parking at the community college stadium, buzzing with hardy athletic types running steps. No more car for the day!
Griselda also points us to a Visitors Center at the Coast Guard Museum adjacent to the harbor. It is 10:40 AM ad the center does not open until 11. The very pleasant gray haired man behind the kiosk at the museum gives us three copies of a Santa Barbara beach/downtown map, tells us about the shuttle downtown, and directs us to bike shops near Shear Wharf at the end of State Street. We walk along the promenade. It is already hot, but we find a breeze to cool us, and get to the Wheel Fun Rentals bike shop before 11. Three bikes and a dragged -out search for helmets that fit later, and we are on our way, teetering on old-fashioned cruiser bikes with coaster brakes and high handle bars.
We biked all the way to the end of the promenade past the Fess Parker Lodge, where I had stayed a decade ago with my husband and mother-in-law and admired the authentic Davy Crockett coonskin cap under glass. Then we turned and went all the way to the other end near where we had parked the car, then back to Start, in just under an hour. Along the way we admired surfers, micro-bikini-wearers, and a bus load of choristers serenading the beach-goers as the end of State Street. A perfect way to begin, though I was already wishing I had worn my long pants as protection against the sun.
We proposed at first to walk uptown, but W noticed signs for a shuttle going up and down State street every 1o minutes. The trolley was open air, crowded with tanned beachgoers and families, and at 25 cents for Seniors , 50 cents for youth, it was a bargain. Looking for historic Santa Barbara, we set down at the Paseo, but we were disappointed to find that it was merely a modern shopping center dressed up in red tile roofs and Adobe.
We did pick up a Santa Barbara walking and business map from the tourist table set up at the entrance to the Paseo, and as we walked up toward what looked like a likely cluster of restaurants, we happened past the Tamira Restaurant, offering an Indian buffet which promised a nice change from tacos or deli sandwiches. Delicious chicken marsala and butter chicken, I didn’t try the tandoori) and vegetables and salad with spicy cucumber dressing and marinated vegetables. No dal.
Lunch having been taken care of, we moved on to the Santa Barbara Art Museum, which had conveniently located all its most interesting pieces on two rooms while the back wing was undergoing renovation. My ROAM card from membership in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum got all three of us in for free. We spent an hour looking at beautiful things in elegant air-conditioned surroundings – W even spent time in the gift shop!
Then to the lovely Santa Barbara Courthouse, with its beautiful sunken garden inner quad, and of course there was a bride, and an adorable little blond ring-bearer, and a self-conscious flower girl, and a bunch of groomsmen gleefully showing off their argyle socks under their tuxedos.
By that time we were dragging, too over-dosed with Adobe and red tile even to peek into the beautiful library or walk a couple of blocks down to the official Old Town. We caught the Shuttle all the way back to the harbor and then spent time in the Maritime Museum, fascinated by exhibits of storms and wrecks and deep-sea expeditions – definitely a Hidden Treasure!
After breakfast we headed out to Carol Vesecky’s organic orchard, where she cultivates about 40 different varieties of fruit. These included several varieties of mulberry, oranges, grapefruit, apples, figs, and several exotic south and Central American varieties that I did not recognize, though my companions who had spent time in South America greeted them like old friends. After picking some mulberries (and eating half of what we harvested as it was picked) we headed for the 
We checked in at the library, an old -style adobe and beam rambling building, then left W there, still writing, and continued to the Ojai Museum, located in a re-purposed church. My cousin, a long-time resident, had never visited before, and found out quite a few things about Ojai that after 27 years of residence she had never learned. 
Some might have been daunted at prescribing mission architecture when in fact Ojai had nothing resembling a mission. No problem. Libbey engineered the building of a mission-style Post Office, complete with a four-story bell tower which chimed each quarter hour. The false storefronts were replaced with cream-colored stucco and tile roofs; the wooden sidewalks were replaced with terra-cotta pavers and covered with arched arcades. Abracadabra! – Instant ambience!
I am off to visit my cousin and friends who are rendezvousing in Ojai, 500 miles south. Google Maps sends me down the old main artery of California, US Highway 101, known as the Bayshore on the San Francisco Peninsula, the Monterey Highway in San Jose, and a dozen other names as it passes, (or nowadays bypasses) every mission town – the brown Historical Marker signs for San Juan Baptista, San Carlos Borroméo del Carmelo, San Miguel, La Purissima, and a number of crumbling Adobe dwellings are more abundant than the Golden Arches on this particular road. But today I am on the freeway, dodging big rigs and RV’s, not looking for picturesque byways. 
For lunch, I treat myself to a stop at the 
What better way to spend a gray and drizzly Sunday in Paris than wandering around the cemetery of Pere-La-Chaise, site of burial of many notable and not-so-notables of recent (since the 1800’s ) French history? The requirement for burial here is that one must have been a French citizen OR have died in France (which is why Jim Morrison and Maria Callas are here.) WB and I spent several contemplative hours in the light rain contemplating the mortality of such immortals as Delacroix, whose masterpiece “The Raft of the Medusa” is harrowingly evoked in bas relief on his tomb.
Then we went to the memorial to the 
Next up to the rooftop terrace to admire the view of everywhere we had been and wave at the folks up on the Eiffel Tower.
We decided to walk back from L’Opera (which was undergoing a revamp of its own behind a Rene Magritte-inspired façade) and stopped at a street-side cafe on Rue Tour Maubourg for wine, tea, and people -watching. We saw Cinderella’s glass coach go by, pulled by a rather ordinary brown horse and with two dotty English tourists inside. Such is life in a tourist city.
Allyson Johnson 