In May my wife, Sarah, and I took a nine-day, 1,250-mile road trip to southern California with a goal of checking out coastal towns big and small.
We headed south through Prunedale and caught Highway 101 south aiming for Santa Barbara where we had a one-night reservation at the Villa Rose Hotel.
This was not the sort of journey where we just tried to rip through as many miles as possible, but rather, take in the color of the land and back roads and look into the history and culture of the state we call home.
It’s hard to roll past San Miguel, right off of Hwy 101, without a brief stop at the 1797 San Miguel Mission, whose foundations were laid more than 200 years ago. The architecture, landscaping and rugged small town offers a rich array of our state’s history.
We sailed through Paso Robles, Atascadero and San Luis Obispo and found our way to the Dana Adobe at the eastern edge of ancient sand dunes which reach six miles from the coast and touch the Temetatte Hills as it blends into Nipomo Creek. The natural beauty and diverse biology of Rancho Nipomo and the region has long been a focal point for botanists, geologists and other scientists. Much of the Dana Adobe’s property is like it was nearly 200 years ago, when Captain Dana first arrived in Nipomo.
on West Highway 246 in Buellton. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
According to danaadobe.org, William Goodwin Dana was born in Boston on May 5, 1797. At 19 he left Boston on his first voyage where he circumnavigated the globe. In the mid-1820s, Dana moved to Santa Barbara and soon married his wife, Maria Josefa Carrillo. They eventually ended up in Rancho Nipomo where they had 21 children, 13 of which reached adulthood. Dana died in 1858 at 60 while Maria died at 71. The family continues to have a strong presence in Central California.
Next, we stopped for a coffee break at Motensen’s Danish Patry in Solvang, the windmill place, in the Santa Ynez Valley. Described by some as the Danish Capital of America, the place was founded in 1911 when a group of Danish Americans purchased 9,000 acres, and in the 1940s began building a string of Danish-style structures including a bunch of windmills, which draws a lot of tourists.
Our first night was in Santa Barbara at the Villa Rose Inn, a Spanish Colonial-style place with a contemporary flair a few blocks off the beach. We learned the nearby pier, or Stearns Wharf, is the oldest working wood wharf in California, built in 1872 by John Peck Stearns to facilitate the transfer of cargo and people from ships to shore.
After checking in we roamed over to State Street, the main drag through downtown Santa Barbara and stumbled on Milk and Honey Tapas. On top of the warm and inviting atmosphere, their corn and shrimp tacos and calamari were fantastic.
In the next part of this series, we check out the wharf, find my grandparents’ graves for the first time and head south to Venice Beach.
