It's spring break at PLNU, so with Jesse free of teaching, it's been our plan from the start for him to take a week off of HOPE work and all take a family vacation. Given that we've been hitting up one or two destinations around San Deigo each weekend, and occasionally squeezing a day trip in on a random weekday as well, it felt weird to pack up for "vacation." Even on the many regular days when I go to work for the full day, make dinner for the six of us at night, do laundry, clean kitchen, etc etc....life somehow just feels like vacation out here. (Don't read this as a complaint!)
We left San Diego yesterday after church / lunch and arrived in Santa Barbara late afternoon. Jesse spoke in a couple of classes and had a table representing HOPE's work all morning at Westmont College, so the boys and I amused ourselves in Santa Barbara until collecting Jesse just before 1 p.m. Then we took the scenic route to the unusual, Scandinavian-influence town of Solvang (settled by Danish educators a century ago) for a very late but delicious lunch of sausages, cooked cabbage, potatoes, and pickled beets. After poking around the kitschy-quaint downtown briefly, we hit the road again. The highway wound through the hills and mountains of the Santa Ynez valley covered with seemingly endless grape fields—beautiful—and by suppertime we arrived in Pismo Beach, CA. Since we're pretty committed to buying no more than one meal a day, we scraped together a picnic of sorts to eat on the beach. It was abundantly glorified by the backdrop of a magnificent setting sun.
I'm too pooped to deal with resizing photos tonight...since our penny pinching also included staying at a somewhat seedy motel last night that yielded a rather poor night of sleep on my part. On that point: The cheapest house Jesse found for sale in Santa Barbara, doing a quick curiosity search last evening, was $945,000 for a tiny 3 bedroom, 1 bath place. You can understand that the decent hotels weren't cheap either!
If you want to peek through a quick album from the day, click HERE (and then you can click "slideshow" in the top left to make viewing the pics and captions easier).
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