Day 1 – Travel Day: EWR to LAX to SB

Hello friends! I’m back on the blog for as long as I can keep up so we’ll see how this goes. Vacation day is here! And this time the destination is my favorite place in the entire US – Southern California. While I have to admit this spring I’ve been doing a lot of domestic travel & weekend trips I haven’t had the chance to fully detach and unplug from work this year (or have the time to blog). Needless to say Stelios & I have been overdue for a LONG vacation so we were both really looking forward to this one. For this trip we’re staying in 4 different parts of SoCal , and the first stop is Santa Barbara! As for the rest – well you’ll have to keep reading to find out 😉

Today was a travel day so we woke up bright and early at 5am to head to the airport. Our flight was smooth and even though it was a HUGE plane it didn’t have TVs and was personal device entertainment only. This is so odd to me and while I always download a movie or two on my phone just in case, the airlines really need to step up their game and just start putting TVs on the back of all the seats. It didn’t matter much for me since I planned on sleeping but Stelios didn’t have any headphones for his phone (his phone is wireless headphones only – weird) so he played games on the United app most of the flight.

We landed at 12pm PT and after getting out of the airport I couldn’t get over how gray it was. This was not the California I remembered, but apparently the SMOG was just really bad in LA that day. I guess that’s the difference between landing in LAX vs SNA. I usually prefer flying into Orange County airport but since we were headed to Santa Barbara, for this trip it made more sense to fly into LAX.

After we landed we found the shuttle bus to Alamo to get our rental car – they offered us a highlighter blue Audi (which seemed a bit obnoxious) or a black BMW x3 so we chose the latter. At this point it was 1pm and we were getting hungry but I didn’t want to try to park in LA so I quickly googled “best lunch spots in Venice beach” and clicked on the 1st article from Eater LA.

Travel tip – rather than relying on what google pulls up 1st, I usually try to find an article from The Infatuation, TimeOut, or a local article for quick food recs

We opted for Belles Beach House – a cute Hawaiian restaurant by the beach that was on our way and ranked 4.5 stars on Yelp. I ordered a cucumber mezcal drink & salmon poke bowl – healthy, refreshing, and the ponzu sauce on the poke bowl was JAMMIN. Stelios ordered a local IPA and a fried chicken sandwich that he housed about 4 bites into my meal. By 3pm we were replenished and fueled up – ready for our 2.5 hour drive to Santa Barbara.

Driving up the PCH was beautiful – with the ocean in our view the whole way up, 2+ hours didn’t feel bad at all. We stopped about half way in a country market for Starbucks coffee & then we were back on the road.

The day just kept getting more beautiful. With the sun shining, and the blue sky above, we rolled down the windows, opened the sunroof and kept cruising along the PCH. Upon arrival we checked into the Harbor View Inn – a 4 star boutique hotel on the ocean. The room was extremely spacious, it had the most comfortable king sized bed, a large walk in shower, a balcony, and the hotel had a hot tub, fitness center, pool, and parking lot for our rental car – everything we needed!

After getting settled we had about 45 min to kill before dinner so we walked around the Funk Zone (the neighborhood of SB we were staying in) to get familiar with the area. I could not get over how many wine tasting rooms and breweries there are, all within steps of each other – it was incredible, but also how are we going to taste them all ?! Because there’s so many wineries in Santa Barbara, the downtown is known for its Urban Wine Trail and is divided into different neighborhoods each with several wine tasting rooms. (See map below).

Dinner was at 8pm at Loquita – a farm to table Spanish tapas restaurant. We ordered 2 cocktails – Stelios had La Nicomedes a black tea whiskey cocktail with fig and lemon that tasted SO complex and I ordered Amor de Catalunya a gin drink with peach basil and lemon, that got too strong for my liking when I got to the bottom. We decided to switch to wine for dinner and ordered a flight which was smooth, but the tapas were the real delight – and let me tell you, we went on an Andalusian culinary journey. For tapas we ordered the Spanish octopus, trumpet mushrooms, vaca, charred broccolini, and Spanish chorizo & mussels. Our favorite was the vaca – the steak was cooked to what appeared to be more on the medium rare side than I normally would like, but melted in our mouths and the pesto sauce on the side was perfect. The Spanish chorizo & mussels was Stelios’s 2nd favorite, but I didn’t realize it was a heavy cream sauce (woops) so only ate the mussels on the top for good measure #lactoseprobs. My 2nd favorite dish was the trumpet mushrooms – the Verde sauce and seasoning was incredible and the mushrooms were so juicy.

For dessert we ordered churros that came with 3 dipping sauces, but the Dulce De Leche sauce was out of this world and easily both our favorites. At this point it was 10:30pm PT (which felt like 1:30am ET). We were exhausted after a long travel day so we called it a night and walked back to our hotel for a good nights sleep so we could get an early start tomorrow. Good night.