Rebecca and I went up to Santa Barbara for the weekend (sans kids). It was a relaxing time where we were able to re-connect after my trip to Asia and refresh our relationship and catchup on paused conversations. Rebecca has posted most of what we did over on her xanga/winkipinki_mom. So I won’t repeat what she has already mentioned. Just fill in some of my own thoughts and details.
For my geeky story of the weekend (not the TV story):
While we were shopping at the outlets, I discovered one thing that the Sony store is good for (and it’s not to purchase any of their overpriced goods). For some reason, my list of restaurants did not get synchronized to my Exchange account, so for my last stop, I went into the Stony store and jumped online one of their computer display models and logged onto Outlook Web Access so that I could grab my restaurant list off of my Outlook notes and e-mail it to myself. Problem solved. Thanks Sony 
.Food
We’ve been to Santa Barbara few times now, and we have found some restaurants that we enjoyed. So this trip, we re-visited one, and tried two new ones:
- Opal: new American cuisine with some local Santa Barbara flavor. The food was good, they had some unique and creative recipes, and better yet, it wasn’t expensive. A nice touch was that I had made reservations for dinner, but we ended up getting into town a little late, so I called ahead to let them know. And they still saved us a nice table in front.
- Tupelo Junction: we have been to this restaurant for breakfast a couple of times before, and each time, the restaurant has moved to a different location. The food is country / southwestern, and there isn’t anything like it that I know of in Orange County. Yummy breakfast scrambles.
- Bouchon: we went to this restaurant after our day of wine tasting, which was somewhat unfortunate, because this place specializes in localized french recipes paired with local wines. Regardless, we enjoyed a great meal with some great service. And I don’t care what those food nazis think, the foie gras was delicious.
Wine
This was our first time wine tasting and we certainly enjoyed ourselves. We learned a few lessons and tricks along the way that we will be sure to apply in future tastings, such as you don’t have to drink all of the wine and bring our own cheese and crackers.
- Daniel Gehrs: this tasting-room was actually in the small town of Los Olivos where a lot of wineries in the area have their tasting-rooms so that people don’t have to drive all the way out to the actual wineries. This was our first stop because it just happened to be the first one along Los Olivos one main strip. The proprietor was very friendly and informative, especially as he showed us newbies how it was done. I also got my first taste of Port, mmmm-yum.
- Fess Parker: we decided to get out of town and go to some actual wineries. This is the biggest and one of the more well-known in the area. I figure since this was our first time, we might as well start out with one that was experienced and well-established. Turns out that it was nice but nothing spectacular.
- Zaca Mesa: this was another winery that I found in my last-minute wine-tasting research. It didn’t look like much was we drove up, but we changed our minds as we drove to the back and walked in. The proprietor was very enthusiastic about wines and helped us to understand the differences that winemakers emphasize in their own wines. This was the only place that we ended up buying a bottle, 2003 Z Three. We’ll have to think of a good occasion to enjoy this.