Santa Barbara was always intended to be a stop off point for our eastward bound trip to Las Vegas. Greyhound buses have a lot of coverage but you have to plan carefully to get the right buses choosing either day or night journeys to fit your ongoing plans.
After a Kelly had spent the time doing this planning, hands up Kelly is my personal planner! We had taken a night bus ride from San Francisco leaving about 8pm travelling some beautiful scenic coastlines of the Californian coasts as the sun set. The following morning circa 6am we were dropped at the station, dazed and confused and with a hotel to get to, we had to wait our turn in line to call for a taxi. On a positive, this was our last ever overnight Greyhound. Hurrah!
Upon arrival at the hotel we paid an additional 1/2 day to go straight to the room to freshen up. We cleaned our teeth and things and held on until 7am (when breakfast began) to go down and grab a tray of complimentary goodies. Tray filled with cereal, juice and pastries we retreated to our room to get a few hours kip, allowing us our breakfast at our leisure.
A few hours later we tucked into a fairly decent breakfast of cereal and brewed a fresh pot of coffee to set us up for the day. We also browsed the handful of leaflets Kelly had the foresight to collect on checking in and made our plans to head down to the pier. $22 dollars in taxi and a rather agitated Mike & Kelly were cursing their rip off merchant taxi ride and hotel for suggesting an expensive option of a taxi over the lesser priced regular public buses (although the hotel said about $12). Lesson learned we vowed to never take another cab whilst in Santa Barbara!
We soon relaxed as we saw a pretty nice looking beach area and a wooden pier extending out to the ocean, so we did the tourist thing and went for a stroll along the prom prom, prom! We walked to the end taking pictures as we walked. We then called in for a tray of chips to eat for our slow walk back down. The day itself was quite drizzly/trying to rain and the clouds were really low across the backdrop of mountain scenery. It was really nice to have a walk in the rain along the sea front bringing back childhood memories of Skegness ;) we walked fully down the coast to the harbour area where lots of different sail boats and fishing vessels were moored alongside the odd jet ski and canoe. We walked around the harbour making a stop off to enquire about a trip to go whale watching (which we booked) and then we continued our walk a bit giddy about our trip planned for the following day. We next jumped on the small electric bus that circumnavigates the coast and runs into the downtown area of Santa Barbara where the bus driver came and spent some time planning our onward journey for us back to our hotel. We jumped off where instructed through a very nice looking town area and waited the 5 mins as indicated and jumped on a bus that dropped us outside our hotel. Plus it was about a 5th of the cost of the taxi (gggrrr). We later tried a local eatery as suggested by our hotel and a few reviews online called Harrys, famed not only for it's food and portions but also for it's extra large cocktails. That in mind we decided to share a cocktail (no need to be feeling green before going on a boat the next day) and ordered some food. The portions were indeed generous and the cocktail, lethal! A pint glass filled with what tasted like pure spirits and a drop of lime. (Rocket fuel!)
We managed to get through it whilst congratulating ourselves for not ordering 2 large cocktails that would have been a definite hangover!
So the next day we were up early and got our breakfast much like the day before but we stayed up to eat it this time as we were off whale watching. A short bus ride later and we were at the harbour ready to boar the Condor Express, a hydrofoil type boat that would take us searching for the Grey Whale and other marine critters. Whilst on our way out to sea the 3 volunteer marine naturists told us about what we may encounter focusing on the Grey Whales that they are migrating through the Californian coastline. Within 20 minutes or so we saw our first lot of dolphins - a small group of around 5 -dashing through the water breaking the surface in small groups. So amazing but also a real difficult thing to capture for a photo. Both me and Kelly tried so I changed my camera to record and was hoping to capture some in action swimming.
It was another 25 minutes or so before we saw another larger group of dolphins. This time they were a larger variety and they put on a show swimming up and under the boat for a good 10 minutes. It was great to see them interacting and just playing with the boat. We then went further out towards a naturally occurring gas and oil seap in the ocean where you can see bubbles of gas on the surface and a blue film of oil floating on top of the water along with a strong odour of oil. I think that's the part of the trip where I felt most nauseous. We then headed out to the outer rim of where the whales follow the coastline with fingers crossed that we'd see something. For almost another hour we coasted and saw nothing more than a few birds. With grim resignation was setting in, we headed inside to get a drink as it was quite cold on the deck. The minute I sat down an announcement was made "Ladies and Gentlement we have finally some whales", the rush for the door was giddy! We all stood looking as the captain assured us of 2 or 3 whales. It took a while and after pointing from various people at all sides we saw our first whale blowing out a big geyser of water! We were transfixed, it meant the whale was taking a dive and would be down for 5 minutes, which seems a long time. At that point we were also inundated with a small group of dolphins also wanting to be seen and put on a show. Then across to the left of the boat we saw a whale one bob up and swim under. This must have been 10-15 feet from the boat, a required distance to not interfere with them. We waited and we we rewarded a grey whale bobbed up and then gracefully treated us all to a full view of it's tail before diving back down below. We saw them swimming past at intervals in long motions before heading back down. This whale watching lark isn't as easy as it sounds. We then waited but saw little more than a few squirts of water into the air. Not long after we headed back to shore, we'd done it - on our only free day and seen the whales! Great!! It was amazing and we couldn't wait to see what we'd captured on our cameras.
After getting back to shore we again rode to downtown and grabbed some rather ropey food at a bar and then walked down through the town taking in a few sights. Finally we caught our bus back and took an early night - the next day we were off early for a bus to Vegas.
Mike and Kel