My friend Cheryl came down to visit for a few days this past week. She is in the middle of changing jobs and had three weeks off, lucky so-and-so. We went to our friend Jack’s housewarming party last Saturday (see pics here – they aren’t all that exciting but still…), then took off Monday for a couple of days in Santa Barbara. Chuck got left at home, working. We stayed at the Fess Parker Resort, built by none other than Dan’l Boone himself. Fella had the brains to invest his coonskin earnings in real estate in Santa Barbara and the Santa Ynez valley back in the days when it was moderately affordable. The resort has a spa on site, and a huge pool. it is also very kid and pet-friendly (they actually offer pet massages and room service menus for your four-legged companions). We got there late in the afternoon on Monday, and our room keys wouldn’t work. So we ended up having to fart around for over an hour waiting for someeone to come and fix the lock. They finally did, sort of. One key worked, the other never did. *sigh* They very nicely gave us a discount when we checked out for the bother. After that was resolved, we walked to the downtown area, did some shopping, then walked back to the hotel. I then attempted to use the purported wireless broadband Internet access the hotel offered. Hah! Turned out it was only available in the main building, in certain parts of the main lobby. The signal would fade in and out quite randomly. The very best off the bad signal could be found in the bar, so there was a small group of us who hung out there, wandering around with laptops upheld, checking the signal (Diogenes had nothing on us). I was in the middle of trying to get our blog software reinstalled after it died during our web hosting service switch, so this flaky access was particularly frustrating. Ah well. The next day we had massages and went to the beach and the pool (where they brought pina coladas right to our deck chairs – yum!), then walked down to the marina to check out all of the boats. Since Cheryl was driving home, we parted ways in Santa Barbara and I took Amtrak home. Sure beats fighting L.A. traffic!

See lovely images here of our big adventure.