For the past year, Brandan has been helping plan the Abundant Life conference for singles in our temple district. The planning culminated last weekend with two days of events. Attendees on Saturday participated in temple work, workshops and service projects. One of the projects cleaned up abandoned homeless camps.
The group picked up truckloads of trash. It was hard work, but made a big impact. Another group worked on beautifying the Bear Creek Greenway and a third group made blankets for those in need.
After the service projects, everyone met back together for dinner, a comedian and a night of fun activities including an escape room, a murder mystery, board games and a dance. On Sunday the conference closed with a special Sacrament Meeting. The conference was a great success and the committee is already planning on hosting another conference next year.
Back in March 2020, when everything locked down for covid, we watched a LOT of shows (except for Brandan who was busy with meetings and endless protocol updates.) One of the shows we enjoyed was Psych, a funny detective show about Shawn, who solves crimes by pretending to be psychic, and Gus, his best friend. The show is set in Santa Barbara, California. As weeks of shutdown turned into months of shutdown, we admired the scenes of sunny beaches and red tiled roofs in Santa Barbara and talked about visiting the city once covid ended. Which we thought would be soon. Like in June 2020. But the shutdown dragged on. It looked like we would be able to go in the summer of 2021, but businesses in California closed down again almost as soon as they opened. This week, we finally went.
Spoiler alert: while planning our trip, we learned that Psych was actually filmed in Vancouver, Canada and they just used fake plants and surfboards to make it look like California. We decided we still wanted to go to Santa Barbara and enjoy sunshine and beaches. Becky, Helen and Gibson left Monday morning, along with our pineapple mascot.
Our first day we drove to Monterey, a charming town on the Central California coast.
The town is super cute with tons of gorgeous flowers like these growing along a restaurant.
We had dinner at a classic British pub on Wharf II, a working wharf where fishermen bring their catch to sell.
The show Psych is known for including a pineapple in every episode so we looked for a pineapple every day to photograph. Some days it was harder than others, like Monday when we resorted to taking a photo of dried pineapple from a pharmacy.
On Tuesday we started our day at the Monterey Aquarium, home to all kinds of sea creatures. Some of our favorites were the jelly fish, cuttle fish and giant schools of sardines that swam together in the water in the same way some birds flock together in the sky.
Cannery Row is the most famous street in Monterey. The street used to be lined with canneries that canned sardines, until overfishing caught all the sardines. The canneries closed in the 1950s and now the factories are filled with colorful shops, restaurants and hotels.
We spotted some pineapples in one of the shops.
We also saw seals sunning themselves on rocks near Fisherman's Wharf.
Monterey has a long history, functioning as the capital of Alta California for both Spain and Mexico. After Mexico ceded California to the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War, Monterey hosted California's constitutional convention in 1849. The constitution was negotiated in this building, Colton Hall, in both Spanish and English.
These cute bear statues are in front of Colton Hall. The California grizzly bear is California's state animal. Grizzlies are now extinct in California as the last one in the state was killed in 1922.
We drove to Santa Barbara Tuesday night and went exploring on Wednesday. Our lone Psych stop was a photo op in front of the Santa Barbara Police Department. In the show, the police chief often holds press conferences in front of their version of the police department which looks nothing like this building. The show uses a reddish stucco building in Canada that used to be a girls school.
An entire city block next to the police department is occupied by the Santa Barbara County courthouse, a gorgeous structure that looks like an old Spanish castle, although it was only built in 1927.
The courthouse is open for tours. Visitors have to pass through a metal detector. We didn't notice "pineapple" on the list of prohibited items so we took our pineapple with us.
The inside of the courthouse is beautifully decorated with hand painted tiles and iron railings.
This is the view from the top of the courthouse's clock tower.
Here's another view that shows how amazing Santa Barbara is. The city was devastated by an earthquake in 1925. City planners took advantage of the earthquake to pass laws requiring strict building standards that favor Spanish architecture. Every street we drove on was lined with beautiful buildings. Now that we've been to Santa Barbara, Psych is going to look a little shabby by comparison.
Next we drove to the Santa Barbara Mission. When Spain colonized California in the 1700s, Franciscan priests followed the Spanish armies, building missions for the benefit of the indigenous populations. The Santa Barbara Mission was built in 1786 for the local Chumash people. Although the priests thought they were helping the Chumash, in reality they brought unfamiliar diseases that killed thousands of Chumash and disrupted the Chumash's traditional way of life by forcing them to adopt European lifestyles. The church at the mission was damaged in the 1925 earthquake and also following an earthquake in 1812. It was rebuilt both times.
There is a small cemetery next to the church where thousands of Chumash are buried in unmarked graves. Recently the church has added a mausoleum and it has become a destination burial location for the cremated remains of people of many faiths from all over the world. The door from the church to the cemetery is topped by three skulls, reminders of the shortness of life. We learned that the girl in the book Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O'Dell, was based on the true story about a Native American woman who lived alone for 18 years on one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara. After she was rescued, she caught one the European diseases and died at the mission. She is was buried in this cemetery.
Driving away from the Mission, we caught sight of one of our own chapels, built to match the rest of the buildings in Santa Barbara, and we stopped for a photo.
We explored Stearns Wharf along the shore and found a real life psychic shop offering palm readings.
And found our pineapple for the day. We thought there would be lots of Psych themed souvenirs for sale, but maybe the show is too old. And filmed in Canada. This could be the only Psych reference we saw since pineapples don't really have anything to do with Santa Barbara. The climate is too temperate. The sweatshirt could be a subtle nod to the show.
The water here isn't warm, but compared to the Oregon coast, it's almost pleasant. Helen and Gibson played in the ocean along East Beach.
We stayed on the beach until the sun went down. Interestingly, looking out to sea means looking south, not west. This surprised us at first because we were thinking of California as being the western edge of the United States, and not thinking of the bumps and jogs along its shoreline. This photo was taken looking east.
We started Thursday morning at the Botanical Gardens, a beautiful spot located above the Mission. Santa Barbara is experiencing a drought like the rest of California and this bridge spanned a dry creek bed.
This grove of redwoods is only about 100 years old. We were surprised to see redwoods in a climate so different from Northern California where the giant redwoods grow. A guide told us they were planted in a time when the gardeners weren't as water conscious as they are now. The grove may be artificially kept alive, but it was wonderfully cool and refreshing to spend time in.
This is a view from the garden looking out to the ocean. Most of the garden is planted with native species, showcasing a wide variety of interesting and beautiful drought resistant plants.
After visiting the botanical garden, we stopped at Trader Joes to restock on snacks.
And we saw a forest of pineapples.
Next we toured the University of California Santa Barbara campus. UCSB felt spacious, with lots of green areas on the sprawling campus. This is a photo in front of the bell tower.
There is a lagoon full of pelicans and cranes on one side of campus.
We spent the rest of the afternoon at Goleta Beach, less than a mile from UCSB.
We left Santa Barbara on Thursday afternoon and drove to Solvang, about an hour away. Solvang was founded in 1911 by a group of Danish Americans who wanted a sunny Californian community away from cold Midwestern winters. The town has flourished as a tourist destination. This handsome viking was outside our hotel.
Taking selfies usually feels like too much work, but this felt worth the effort.
Solvang is impossibly cute. The city was decorated for its upcoming Fourth of July celebration.
All of the buildings look like they were imported from Europe.
Instead of offering breakfast, our hotel gave us a certificate for pastries at the bakery across the street.
We had lots of delicious Danish pastries to choose from. There is a bakery on every block in town so it was helpful to have our hotel narrow down which one to try.
There's a statue of Hans Christian Andersen in the park.
And a marker that shows it is only 11,270 km to Copenhagen.
Strangely enough, we saw lots of pineapples in Solvang. Pineapples really don't have anything to do with Denmark.
This is a pineapple pepper shaker. The salt shaker for the set was a cactus, which doesn't make sense.
And here are pineapple bucket hats.
We saw several buildings shaped like windmills.
Storks are believed to offer good luck and protection to the houses they nest upon in Denmark so many buildings have statues of storks on their roofs.
There are 3 things to do in Solvang. One: walk around and admire how cute everything is. Two: shop. Three: eat. All of these are fun choices. We stopped for gelato before leaving town.
Driving out of town, we passed the Santa Ines Mission, founded in 1801. It fell into disrepair after Mexico won its independence and Spain stopped supporting the missions. It's been restored and is currently used as a church. It's a quarter mile and another world away from the rest of Solvang.
Meanwhile, Brandan was working at home. He also took time to research some family history and attended a retirement party for his friend, Dr. Dan Brandenburg.
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