I’m keeping with my New Year’s resolution to blog more and that includes this blog, not just DBA Kevlar, Microsoft and the tech blog… 🙂

We landed north of Santa Barbara last week and are enjoying the lovely coast after the desert of Palm Springs. Its nice to see green again and be north enough of LA that we can avoid much of what we dislike about the area. Santa Barbara starts to get into the Northern California coast weather, just a bit warmer.

As with most places we visit, I hit two farmers markets, first one in the town of Goleta and then south to the main one for Santa Barbara. They keep to mostly fresh produce at these markets, unlike many of the locations we’ve been, where you’ll find crafts and wares. The sheer amount of citrus is what gets me. In California, it’s not uncommon to find 4-5 different types of mandarins and another 7 types of lemons at a stall. My favorite, satsumas are everywhere, wafting the air with their lovely perfume, (my favorite hand lotion is called Satsuma, so you can imagine how much I love this!). I did pick up some interesting dwarf mandarins yesterday at the Santa Barbara farmers market:

The market is just off of the most popular walking area in Santa Barbara, just off the wharf, State Street. We wandered down there for a short bit and I visited it earlier in the week to locate the Lilac Patisserie.

Voted one of the top ten gluten free bakeries in the US, it was somewhere I wanted to check out and see what all the hype was about. Yeah, not bad-

We also made it down for a lovely dinner on the wharf Friday night. Living so long in Colorado, you learn that if you have a chance for fresh seafood, take it!

The RV Park itself isn’t too bad- it’s not the resort style we’ve become accustomed to the last couple months and this one fills up during the weekends with a ton of kids. The beach is just a couple hundred meters away, but it’s definitely a surfer’s beach, so the kids live at the pool. There is a masseuse that can be scheduled onsite, which I did take advantage of when we first arrived. The dogs are missing their huge dog park they had at the last place, as this one only has a small enclosure, but that is the challenge of RV life- you never know what to expect at RV Park sites. They can be drastically different and cost and location are not good indicators.

We have one of our longest trips this next move, over 7 hours of driving to get north of San Francisco. It’s time like these you realize just how big California is and the challenge of driving through its myriad of urban areas.