Santa Ynez Valley - Sept 2010

A weekend filled with wine tasting and scuba diving seemed like the perfect opportunity to visit Santa Barbara.  I grew up watching Santa Barbara soap opera.  I had an image of beautiful coast line and a peaceful place. 

We drove up on a Friday afternoon leaving San Diego by 11am.  We ended up with a little traffic on the 5 north of LA, but soon we turned off onto the 126 and it was smooth sailing.  We tried to take the long way around LA to avoid any traffic.  Now that we have discovered the longer way around LA, which really isn’t longer time wise, we are back into exploring California.  We got stuck in real bad traffic once on a Friday afternoon taking the 5 all the way through LA to go white water rafting near Sequoia National Park and really didn’t take many road trips after that experience.

Once we got to the Coast Fwy and started heading north out of Ventura, we could see the marine layer creeping in.  We got to our hotel in Santa Barbara about 4pm.  We booked a weekend stay on points at the Fees Parker's DoubleTree Resort.  We got to choose a room with a partial ocean view, but we never did see the ocean from our room since it was fogged in most of our stay. 

After taking our stuff to our room and resting for a minute, we decided to go out walking around.  I love when you can explore an area on foot.  We walked along the beach down to Stearns Wharf.  It was a nice evening, a little sun came out.  There were lots of birds on the beach: pelicans, black skimmer, and seagulls.  We walked out to the end of the pier and made our way into town along State Street. 

KU was playing football that Friday evening and Mike would look into every bar we passed to see if the game was on TV.  Finally, we walked passed a bar and I suggested we go in to see if we can find out about the game.  This made Mike very happy.  It really is hard to travel places when our college teams are playing sometimes.  We had a couple drinks and watched the game, once having to have them turn it back to our game when they tried to change the channel. 

After a few drinks, we were in the mood for Mexican food.  I consulted Yelp’s mobile app and discovered great reviews for a taco stand, Lilly’s.  It was between Lilly's and another one, which we walked by and only one person was sitting outside.  When we got to Lilly’s the place was packed with locals.  We thought it must be good, so we went in to order.  They have several different types of tacos.  I was a little nervous seeing eye, cheek, tongue, etc, and was going to stick with a couple of beef tacos when Mike blurted out to the cashier that we wanted one of each!  Gulp!  I guess we are going to be adventureous!  When our 9 tacos were ready, we loaded them up with salsa from the salsa bar and shared half of each different taco.  They really weren’t bad, although the texture on some were not to my liking.  My favorite one ended up being the pork one.

We called it an evening after dinner, grabbed a coffee and walked back to our hotel.  Before turning in, however, we enjoyed some time in the hot tub. 

The next day, Saturday, we got up and had breakfast at the hotel and got ready for our wine trip into Santa Ynez valley.  We’d booked a trip with Sustainable Vine Wine Tours.  They are rated highly on Trip Advisor and visited wineries that focused on organic and biodynamic farming.  It sounded like a great tour.  Bryan, the owner and driver, is a very nice guy and loves to talk wine and about the farming techniques.  He is really interested in questions and teaching everyone about the sustainability of the wineries we visited. 

Our first stop, Alma Rosa, was featured in the movies Sideways and The Kids are Alright.  We walked out back for a tasting standing around outside.  We had about 4 or 5 pours and bought 2 bottles.  We liked the wine, the place, and their story.  The family that runs the place lost a lot of vineyards, money and their namesake (Sanford Winery) in a battle with another party.

Our next stop was in Lompoc and an area known as the “Wine Ghetto”.  It looks like an industrial area with a bunch of metal buildings.  All through the buildings are tasting rooms.  Supposedly some good wine comes from these places.  We went to visit Ampelos’ tasting room.  It was actually their first day of opening the tasting room.  It was all bare inside, but we had a great tasting while listening to the owner’s stories, he loved talking!  Ampelos is Greek work meaning vine.

We had ordered sandwiches for lunch in advance with Bryan and they were included in our tour price.  We ended up going over to Ampelos Vineyards to have our lunch at a table under a tree next to the grapes that made the wine we had just tasted in the tasting room.  We also opened 2 bottles of Ampelos wine to share amongst the group while enjoying lunch.  It was a nice day, the sun had come out and it was cool in the shade. 

After lunch, we made one more stop at Demetria Estate.  This place is located in a hilly area and vineyards were planted all along the hills.  The scenery is beautiful.  They have a very casual tasting atmosphere sitting at tables under a tree overlooking their vineyards.  We were lucky to have live music as well.  After tasting, Bryan took us behind the house to check out the machine used for making their wine.

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We really enjoyed the tour and made it back to our hotel around 6:30pm, which is actually later than we’d expected.  We’d asked everyone on the tour where to go for dinner and we settled on Ca’ Dario.  We called and had a reservation set up for 8:30pm.  We enjoyed a nice late dinner there and headed back to our hotel afterwards.  We were tired from a long day of tasting wine.

We had planned on scuba diving the Channel Islands the following day, but the trip got cancelled since there weren’t enough people signed up.  I guess we have to make another trip up there to get to scuba dive.

Trip Summary

Lodging -   Fee's Parker Doubletree Resort

Food - Lilly's Taqueria, Ca' Dario

Activity - Sustainable Vine Wine Tour