I like Santa Barbara anyway. I think even Woody Allen would like it. Santa Barbara is what Southern California could have been: People here actually walk places, history was never put to the bulldozer, and, following the cues of nature, the spectacular is rarely ostentatious. Arriving in Santa Barbara immediately makes you want to start traveling: With its Mediterranean climate, Mexican adobe, and Spanish tiles, the city reeks of somewhere else.

After days of paddling, camping, and hiking on Santa Cruz, I was sunburned and famished enough to eat a tablecloth. I swapped the Ventura docks for Santa Barbara's creosote pier, thirty minutes away, where I devoured steamed shrimp at the Santa Barbara Shellfish Company. My second day's stop was lunch at Citronelle, overlooking the curving beach. Moments after I sat down, Julia Child rolled out of the elevator in a wheelchair.

You know you are going to eat well when America's most trusted doyenne of kitchen arts occupies the next table. I sat quietly and basically told the waiter, "I'll have what she's having." This turned out to be an appetizer of huge prawns, preening from a bed of crisp kataifi pastry on a ravigote sauce, followed by chicken Niçoise and a glass of grassy, herbal viognier from Vogelzang Vineyard, located right here in Santa Barbara County.

Child was in an agreeable mood—the kind induced by a good meal with a view of beach, palm trees, and an azure bay. There was sun, but also just enough fog to hide the oil derricks on the horizon. She had no trouble explaining why she makes her home in Santa Barbara. "It is the best place to live. It's beautiful. I love it for its Europeanness. It's better than Europe." Santa Barbara, she noted, has a large population of native French people—perhaps five thousand—and if the French bring their sophisticated palates here, that is enough proof of the town's culinary superiority.

"Europe," she added for emphasis, "is very crowded."

The Pierpont Inn has the venerable, smoky air of unhurried age, a mood of timelessness enhanced by the black-and-white photos of mustached gentlemen standing stiffly beside enormous swordfish. Located high on a bluff over Ventura, Santa Barbara's underappreciated stepsister, the Pierpont is a century-old sporting lodge, and the wraparound windows in the dining room revealed dawn's touch on the curving bay. Life may have moved slowly for the swordfish set, but time marches quickly these days: I wolfed down a breakfast of true Irish porridge because there was a boat that was leaving-—with or without me. I raced the few miles to Ventura Harbor and was the last man to jump aboard the Spectre, one of the jumbo-sized scuba boats that regularly visit Anacapa. Within an hour, we were anchored a few dozen yards off Anacapa's rocky coast, although I knew this only from the sound of surf breaking on the shore. The island itself was invisible. Fog covered us so thickly that I could hardly see the end of the boat, and the neoprene figures of more than twenty-five other divers moved about in a haze, disappearing one by one over the side. After suiting up, I followed eagerly, only to be shocked by my first submersion into the icy Pacific.