The Mission

I woke up rested and headache free after at least 9 hours of good rim sleep. We went over to Will's for breakfast after a quick stop at Trader Joe's. Will's rental is on a city street but is situated far back from the street behind the main house, a long green/grassy path leads you to his "cottage" and as you walk down the path you are surrounded by fruit trees, benches, lawn art, gardens, a fountain, even a few statues, and eventually greeted by live chickens scampering about the grounds. The cottage is small and quaint with an eclectic mix of Mexican, Tanzanian, Tahitian art... all places the owner resided at one time or another. After breakfast John went back to the hotel to work and Will and I went into downtown Santa Barbara to kick aound, explore and to get my cellphone "unlocked" so it can be used abroad. I met up with John and we went to The Mission: Santa Barbara. There are 21 missions and California pretty much grew out of the missions founded by the Franciscans beginning is 1769, Santa Barbara was the tenth of the California missions founded by the Spanish Franciscans, the original purpose of the mission was the Christianization of the Chumash Indians. The Chumash seemed to be doing just fine before the Franciscans arrived to "help" them and thousands died of disease after they were "helped" and Christianized and stripped of their culture and land. Today the Santa Barbara Mission is basically a tourist attraction, you can take a self-guided tour of the church and grounds for $5 and buy overpriced plastic stuff in the giftshop or for the Catholic in your life who has everything you may purchase a wine bottle cover in the form of a friars robe. We met up with Will again later in the evening for dinner at Brophy Bros., a seafood restaurant overlooking the Santa Barbara Harbor. We had a really good dinner unfortunately, the only available table was near the door so we had to keep our coats and jackets on through the entire meal. After dinner we came back to the hotel to watch more of the Australian Open or I should say Will came back to watch tennis, John fell asleep and I'm writing about the day. Tomorrow we're meeting for breakfast, then going for a bike ride, then exploring wine country, and ending the evening with dinner and meeting up at some point with Marie's (Will's girlfriend) sister and her husband who live here in Santa Barbara. The weather is supposed to be much nicer tomorrow warmer and sunny.