Escaping the threat of 40-knot southerlies we pulled into Glorietta Bay, right next to the Hotel Coronado. Heading in, we rowed out of the way of a huge cruise ship which I had mistaken for a building, and then continued to row around aircraft carriers and past the late-night skyline of the city. We left before I could realize my fantasy of poached eggs with hollandaise sauce and coffee in the hotel. We followed another mammoth cruise ship toward Ensenada--the passengers were most likely playing slots and enjoying the midnight buffet while we blew south in the warm, midnight Santa Anas.
Leaving Santa Barbara with a decent 10-knot breeze, we passed "Mr. Clean," the optimistically named vessel that services the oil rigs off the coast, tethered to a large mooring ball upon which several seals were lounging. I took this picture even though I knew it wouldn't really turn out. We are all the time passing seals and sea lions on buoys and various sea balls, and they look up languidly, vaguely interested, more or less welcoming us, or so it seems, and their whiskered faces make me think of blubbery kittens. I love to see how sea life appropriates human technology. Once, sailing in the bay, we passed a bell buoy ringed with cormorants, facing the source of the rhythmic pinging as if in mute adoration of some ancient god.
(I never noticed that in sheep with horns, their ears are under the horns. I wonder if they ever want to raise their ears into a higher position. If they did, would they get wedged behind the horns? Would it take hours to work them down again?)
They say, here in Santa Barbara, that the Santa Barbara Courthouse is "the most beautiful courthouse in America"; everything looks like it should be in a movie (about heroic Spanish explorers, with stilted dialogue spoken by tan white people). Judges are movie stars, and maybe the outlaws are movie stars too. All this was designed after the "real" (Victorian) downtown Santa Barbara was destroyed by an earthquake in 1925, and civic boosterism bursts from the "educational" murals. In the Meeting Room, tourists can walk around and take pictures even when there's a meeting going on. I tried not to accidentally insert myself into the commemorative photos of a commitment ceremony and a quinceañera as I wandered, imagining myself enthusiastically heading to my court date.
Escaping the threat of 40-knot southerlies we pulled into Glorietta Bay, right next to the Hotel Coronado. Heading in, we rowed out of the way of a huge cruise ship which I had mistaken for a building, and then continued to row around aircraft carriers and past the late-night skyline of the city. We left before I could realize my fantasy of poached eggs with hollandaise sauce and coffee in the hotel. We followed another mammoth cruise ship toward Ensenada--the passengers were most likely playing slots and enjoying the midnight buffet while we blew south in the warm, midnight Santa Anas.
