Santa Barbara Scenery

We're getting ready to leave Santa Barbara and drive home, so I've taken pictures of a few of the scenes that I enjoyed during my stay, and picked a few to illustrate how beautiful this place is.

Near my yoga studio is Alice Keck Park Memorial Gardens (which I think of as Park Park). In one city block, inventive landscape designers have created a number of tiny climate regions -- wetlands, collections of dry-climate plants, flowering trees, ground covers, and a duck pond, shown above.



I like the tiny artificial streams that criss cross the park and flow down its slightly sloping grounds. Children often play near the duck pond. They seem to love to feed the ducks, the few white geese, and the turtles that live in the pond. I imagine that they think the park is much larger than it really is.



Arroyo Burro beach is around 10 minutes from our temporary apartment. Above, the beach on the sunniest and warmest day we enjoyed, which was earlier this week. The little girl with the parasol kept twirling it, holding it over her companion, and otherwise playing with it.



The day after sunshine -- heavy fog. The ocean is barely visible behind these beachgoers at Goleta Beach near the UCSB campus. The Goleta Pier almost disappeared into the fog.





Finally, for the first time this morning, I walked on the headland above Arroyo Burro Beach. It's called the Douglas Preserve. A friend showed me how to get there, as I had never figured it out in all our visits to Santa Barbara. We walked around with her little dog Willie. The sunny beach in the prior photo is at the left.