We stopped at Lazy Acres, which is what they call Whole Foods here, to pick up some food and drink before we headed out on the sailboat. The captain told us they'd upgraded our boat, from a 22' to a 46', which means the three of us could occupy different parts of the boat and not even realize anyone else was on board.
We said we wanted to see whales, but also to learn how to sail; that was the priority. The captain taught us how to hard-a-lee or jib ho or whatever -- we couldn't quite grasp the terminology, but we did each of us manage to turn the boat 180 degrees in both directions. You never know when that skill is going to happen.
We were within a hundred feet with no other sound in the world save the sounds the world makes when we heard two whales surfaced. We followed them for about an hour, as they dove (revealing a deceptively elusive whale tail) and made mist with their breath, while sea lions chased us, and we took pictures and videos and laughed and drank and napped for four hours on a Saturday afternoon.
I checked my messages as we were loading things into the car and my American Express card had called because someone had found my wallet (with my tips from Friday) in the parking lot of Lazy Acres, turned it in to customer service, and the employees called the number on the back of the first credit card they found, and AmEx called me. They had to fetch my wallet from the safe, and all the money was still in there. My wallet was found before it was ever lost.
We were walking home from a hike to the top of Elings Park to see the sunset when C--- received an invitation to the Cliff Room. I immediately thought of the Cliff House in San Francisco, the time my mother and I stayed in the condo on the Great Highway, owned by the family friends with the autistic child, whose bed had rubber sheets on it, and I think Cheyenne was there too. This would have been eighth grade then, and we the three of us went to have oysters and shirley temples at the Cliff House.
I did not want to be seen at the Cliff Room, a dive bar amongst dive bars, at that particular moment in time. When Dawn told me it was by Alcazar, that sounded infinitely more appealing. So we went and had tapas, bacon-wrapped dates in wildflower honey, tostadas, paellita (the most disproportionately cute word for what this meal was, which was deliciously, but decidedly not cute), and sangria, obviously, in the womb that is that restaurant, with Les Triplettes de Belleville floating on the wall behind my boss.
It was probably time to go home at that point, but Kristie's sister is in town and so I went over there around 11pm, and we chatted and giggled until Kristie's roommate kicked us out, so we drove back to mine and chatted and giggled and ate leftover chicken divan and brussel sprouts I sauteed with the GENIUS recipe Katie recommended to me.
They left around 2am, and I fell asleep watching Mad Men, and woke up seven hours later to make my appointment with my new personal trainer (OH GOD THIS IS GOING TO SUCK) with invitations to brunch and hikes and mass (???), and instead I'm meeting up with Kristie and her sister and Jaime and John M-- to go bikeriding on vintage stringrays and other collectible bikes, I guess, I don't know much about that stuff.
Anyway, everything's coming up daisies in Santa Barbara, is what I'm trying to say.