Dream Trip 2009

Great Travel Moment

It is not often that a local gets to take advantage of his own locale. Santa Barbara is certainly a tourist destination and one that attracts the luxury jet-setter, young familes, and the surfer beach bum alike. One quiet autumn afternoon, determined to look for the tourist traps on Cabrillo Street myself, I was caught off guard by an absence of the bright sun that had been following me on my mission that day. As I shifted my attention from the sunlit hills to the sunset itself, I had to chuckle, realizing the simple reasons why anyone comes to visit the so called "American Riviera." It took an old Spanish street lamp along Butterfly Beach to illuminate my understanding of Santa Barbara's simple allure.