A (mostly) Solo Vacation to Santa Barbara

NOTE: I've been playing around with Michael Shillingburg's photo editing app Photoaster and having a lot of fun. The photos in this post were edited with Photoaster.

I was inspired by how mrshll has a consistent photo transform on all the photos on his site. I'm interested in doing something similar if I can land on a look that I like. This post is the first in figuring out if I like the idea of filtered or transformed photos on my site.

Earlier this month, I accompanied C up to the Santa Barbara area. She's getting her master's at a school up in that area that meets up in person once a month for a weekend. I decided to tag along for this session. Her days are super long (~8 am-9 pm), so the vacation was mostly solo- although I missed her while she was in class all day, it was still nice to spend some time alone without any schedule or responsibilities.

I haven't been up to Santa Barbara since I was a kid, so it was really great to re-discover the area. I was blown away by the nature. The proximity of the beach and the mountains was amazing! It was such a cool experience to stand on the beach and simultaneously basically be at the base of a mountain.

C's school is tucked back into the mountains. Very secluded and peaceful- good for a depth psychology program!

Towards the end of C's last day of class, I sat on a bench in a little garden on campus and listened to frogs croak and nothing else. It was so serene. There's a labyrinth on campus; I learned what that is for the first time in relation to psychology:

But the labyrinth is also a metaphor for what is sacred in our lives. Through its twists and turns, its ancient spaciousness holds everything we experience — our minds and emotions, our physical beings and our spirits, our losses and gains, our successes and failures, our joys and sorrows. When we walk the path inward, we carry our burdens with us. When we meditate or pray in the center, we ask for grace, forgiveness, and understanding. When we walk the path outward, we are lighter, more joyful, and ready again to take on our life’s challenges.

Alex Pattakos Ph.D., Psychology Today

C and I walked through it together. At the end, there was a little area where students had left small offerings like shells, a horseshoe, small crystals, rocks, etc. I found it really endearing.

Nearby the school is the Vedanta Temple. I spent some time there walking through their gardens and sitting inside the temple. The temple is built around the monk Ramakrishna. There was a beautiful shrine inside the temple dedicated to him. While I can appreciate the beauty and aesthetics of spiritual buildings like this temple, I feel a bit uneasy and unable to get in the mood in settings that are built around a single figurehead. I left the temple and found a secluded bench in the garden, and felt much more at peace and did a small guided meditation. While sitting there, I saw an albino chipmunk and a normal chipmunk playing together! No hate, but that felt 10x more spiritual than the shrine to me.

There was a little bookstore at the temple, and I had a really nice conversation with an older British(?) woman working there. She told me about the temple and the three elder nuns who run the place. I asked her about Ramakrishna and the Vedanta Society. She was very excited to tell me all about the gurus that she knows and follows. She wrote down their names for me on a piece of scrap paper in the most adorable, slanted old lady handwriting :')

While I wouldn't call myself spiritual in terms of following a named or established spiritual practice, that conversation with her was probably my favorite part of the trip. It seems like maybe the temple doesn't get a lot of visitors due to its location, and it was clear this woman was very excited to have someone new inquire about the work she is dedicated to. It was really nice!

The hotel we stayed at was in Carpinteria, and the beaches there were beautiful. They had these really nice walking paths all along them. It was extremely windy and too cold to spend much time on the beach unfortunately, but it was worth bearing the weather for the walk at least.

I didn't spend too much time in Carpinteria. There's a very teeny tiny downtown which took me about 20 minutes to walk through. Since it was too cold to go to the beach, there wasn't much else to do there.

I drove over to Santa Barbara and pretty much just walked all around the downtown area. I popped into a bookstore and bought a couple of books. I always end up buying books when I go on vacation to contribute to the local bookstore economy 😅

Walking around downtown, I popped into stores, got some ice cream, and got some chocolates from a chocolate shop for C (this day was her birthday, but she had to spend it all in school 😢).

There was a pretty lookout point near Santa Barbara that I went to and read for a little while and watched the surfers and dolphins.

I went on a hike just outside of Santa Barbara. The rain clouds were really starting to roll in by this point, and the mountain tops were covered in fog. I saw only one other person on that hike due to the fact that it definitely was not hiking weather. The hike felt really ethereal.

Because of the impending storm, C's school told everyone to leave a day early to avoid getting flooded in. I was getting evacuation notices left and right on my phone for people who live near waterways. We hit the road a day early and were able to avoid any rain.

It was a really nice, if brief, little trip. I haven't been on a solo trip in a while, and it was really nice to spend some time exploring on my own. It was also really nice to see where C goes to school and meet a few of her classmates- I'm really proud of her.

It was a cool, unique experience to be there on the precipice of this big storm. You don't get too much cloudy rainy weather in SoCal, so it was kind of cool to be up in the mountains with all the fog and mistiness.

Hopefully, I'll be able to visit again sometime in the warmer months!