Santa Ynez and Back

The Sunday before Mother’s Day, my daughter and I drove up to Santa Barbara under overcast skies. We met my mother and my sister at the old Jesuit church on Sola Street next to Alameda Park. There was a chill in the morning air as we stood on the church steps after Mass.

We had driven up without definite plans, but the gray skies and the chill made me want to go inland, where it would be sunny and warm. The four of us talked it over and came to consensus – we would make a circle, taking the San Marcos Pass over the mountains into the Santa Ynez Valley, then back through the Gaviota Pass and down the coast past the beaches at El Capitan and Refugio.

San Marcos Pass

The San Marcos Pass is at the southern end of California State Route 154. It winds up the steep face of the Santa Ynez Mountains, cutting through manzanita and scrub oak and the pressed and folded remains of an ancient shoreline. We climbed past bare sandstone walls, the sedimentary striations upended and exposed. As we neared the top, the gray mist thinned and the light grew brighter. We reached the summit, some 2,000 feet above the Santa Barbara plain, under blue skies and a strong midday sun.













Beyond the summit, the highway dropped down into the foothills along the southern rim of the Santa Ynez Valley. Dark green chaparral covered the slopes, then gave way to the brighter green and taller canopy of canyon and streambed trees. Beyond lay rolling emerald hills and oak savannas. The San Rafael range rose up on the far side, rugged peaks dominating the northern horizon.

My mother stirred in the passenger seat. “Everything is so green,” she said.

It was a phrase she would repeat several times that day. I understood the feeling. Spring is, after all, a special time in arid Southern California. For most of the year, the coastal mountains are a brown and yellow world – desiccated foliage under a harsh sun. The green of spring comes as a surprise and then fades quickly. More often than not, it is gone by June.

Cold Spring

Our plans called for lunch at Cold Spring Tavern, a fabled Route 154 stopover that dates back to stagecoach days. To get there, we left the highway and followed a country road next to a creek shaded by sycamores. We drove under the soaring arch of the highway bridge, then came to a pretty glen with a boulder-strewn stream flowing through it. The tavern sits just off the road in the shadow of a steep hill, its wood-and-stone walls covered in ivy.


A small fleet of motorcycles was parked out front. Cold Spring Tavern was something of a biker hangout when I was a college student in Santa Barbara three decades ago. On this Sunday, however, most of the ponytails I saw were gray and the faces looked well scrubbed and well fed. They were also smiling -- the “vibe” was relaxed and friendly.

We were seated quickly. The restaurant interior was dark and a bit cramped but had plenty of rough charm. The tables were covered in red-and-white gingham check. Taxidermy and Western paraphernalia festooned the walls. A number of fireplaces were burning. They provided a warm glow and the scent of hickory.

Service was attentive and prompt. I ordered the chile verde. We handed our menus back to the waitress and drifted off into small talk.

There was little in the way of an agenda for the day. My mother and my sister hadn’t seen my daughter, a bright and personable nine year-old, for some time and missed her. My wife’s schedule had locked her into working a series of Sundays, so we wouldn’t be able to come up the following week. Today was an early Mother’s Day for my mother and me.

My mother will celebrate her eighty-seventh birthday next month. She looks and acts like someone barely seventy.

“You don’t seem old, Mom,” I told her at one point that day.

“Oh, but I feel old,” she replied, a genuine weariness in her voice. But the weariness always seems to pass quickly.

At lunch, as she listened to me brag about her granddaughter’s latest report card, she smiled and laughed. Her laugh is throaty and her smile slightly crooked. Both are accompanied by a kind of light in her eyes. I don’t know how else to describe it. I think of that look my mother gets as “Irish eyes.”

Lake Cachuma

We finished our meal (the chile verde was excellent), found our way back to the highway and quickly reached Lake Cachuma, a bright patch of blue in the rolling green hills.

The lake was created in 1953, when an earth-filled dam was built across the Santa Ynez River to capture and store winter runoff from the surrounding mountain ranges. When full, the lake’s surface occupies more than 3,000 acres, with some 40 miles of shoreline. The shape is a jagged jigsaw piece, with many bays, inlets, peninsulas and promontories. Cachuma is the primary water source for the cities and farms of the Santa Barbara alluvial plain. A six-and-a-half-mile tunnel carved through the bedrock underneath the Santa Ynez Mountains feeds a series of reservoirs in the foothills along the coast.

In drought-prone Southern California, Cachuma has experienced some hard times. I can recall driving past miles of cracked and dried mud flats in 1989, when the lake had shriveled to barely a fifth of normal levels. (That brush with disaster is unlikely to be precisely repeated -- in 1993, with voter approval, a 42-mile pipeline was built linking Cachuma to the California Aqueduct.)

The day of our trip, drought was just a memory. The lake was full and the water shimmered. We entered the park operated by Santa Barbara County on the lake’s south side. Wandering along a drive near the shore, we came upon three round, tent-like structures, each one placed atop a wooden deck with a balustrade and a great view of the lake and the dam.

“What are those?” my daughter asked.

I had no idea. I was about to expose my ignorance, when my sister, who is widely knowledgeable, spared me.


“Those are yurts,” she said. She went on to explain that the word and the concept come from Central Asia and the portable round huts found in many nomad cultures there. The Lake Cachuma yurts are maintained by the county and available for weekend and vacation rental, she added.

My daughter was fascinated. I have the feeling a “yurt vacation” is in our future.

Mission Santa Inés

We left the park and returned to the highway. Past the dam and the end of the lake, we turned off Route 154 and drove west on Route 246, in order to connect us with U.S. 101. I popped Appalachian Spring into the CD player as we wandered through the Santa Ynez Valley countryside, passing vineyards and pastures on our way to the town of Solvang.

Solvang was founded by a group of Danish immigrants in 1911, very near Mission Santa Inés (“Inés” is Spanish for Agnes;“Ynez” is a Yankee-era corruption). Long a magnet for tourists, Solvang (the name means “sunny field”) has maintained its Danish identity almost to the point of having become more a Disneyland-style theme park than a town – there are windmills, roofs of thatch and copper, squared Copenhagen-style building-fronts, and a bust of Hans Christian Anderson in the central park.

There are also dozens of bakeries. For anyone with a sweet tooth, Solvang is a dangerous place. We stopped at a bakery near the Mission and picked up some cookies for dessert – macaroons with a dollop of apricot preserves on top. They were delicious.

The Mission, however, was my real reason for stopping. My daughter, a fourth-grader, has been studying California history, including the Spanish missions. In the course of recent travels, I have tried to stop and show her as many as possible. Together, we have seen ten of the 21 – San Diego, San Fernando, San Buenaventura, Santa Barbara, San Juan Bautista, Carmel, San Jose, San Francisco de Assis (Dolores) -- and, most recently, Santa Inés and San Juan Capistrano.

From the bakery, we crossed a parking lot to the Mission and its gardens. My mother, my sister and my daughter ducked into the church for a visit while I stayed outside to explore and take photographs. In order of founding, Santa Inés is the nineteenth of the 21 missions. It was established in 1804 to shorten the journey between Santa Barbara and La Purisima (near present-day Lompoc). Well preserved, with a beautiful bell tower, Santa Inés, staffed by Capuchin priests, continues to serve as a Catholic parish.

Gaviota

Refreshed, we resumed our drive, reaching the junction with U.S. 101 at Buellton. We headed south, back through the Santa Ynez Mountains. This time, however, we took the Gaviota Pass.

There is something exciting – even a little harrowing, perhaps – about the steep descent to the sea through the Gaviota Pass. The canyons cut deep and the hillsides, oak-dotted and boulder-strewn, tilt seaward at sharp angles. The roads dip and plunge and driving takes on a headlong quality – you have to watch your speed. Strong winds push inland and bounce upward. Raptors ride the draft up, away and out of sight.

At the bottom of the ride, one is rewarded by an extremely beautiful stretch of land between the mountains and the sea. A series of mesas, canyons and headlands west of Goleta, the Gaviota coast has retained its essentially rural character – so far.

It was late afternoon when we emerged from the pass. The overcast we had left behind that morning along the Santa Barbara Channel coast was gone. We made an easterly sweep down the highway under blue skies. To my left, grassy meadows waved in the gentle breeze, the dominant green softened by wild mustard yellow. To my right, the seascape was bright. Far across the water, the Channel Islands were dark blue shapes in a faint haze.

I felt the tug of nostalgia. The Gaviota, Refugio and El Capitan beaches are all half an hour or less from the University of California at Santa Barbara campus. They were points of refuge for me in my student days – quiet places to read and think, far from the crowd. From the highway, their beauty is apparent still. It is good to see.

We drew near our next stop – Goleta. My mother has seven children, three of whom live in the Santa Barbara area, including my middle sister, who accompanied us on the day’s journey. Another sister, my youngest, lives in Goleta with her husband and their nineteen month-old twin daughters. Like her other grandchildren, they are a great source of joy to my mother, who spends time with them nearly every day.

We arrived at my sister’s and were treated to a warm greeting. The twins gave us a demonstration of their newest toy. It is a red Radio Flyer wagon with room for two (plus cupholders!). My mother’s “Irish eyes” beamed with delight.

Carpinteria

The visit with the twins over, we took my mother and sister home and exchanged good-bye hugs. We were close to Foothill Boulevard, so I drove along it, passing behind the Santa Barbara Mission. Beyond the mission, I shifted over to Alameda Padre Serra, a street high on a ridge that overlooks the entire city of Santa Barbara and its harbor. We followed the ridge as far as we could, then rejoined the 101 at Summerland.

I hadn’t planned on stopping again, but as we left Summerland, my daughter said she was hungry. I looked at the clock. It was later than I realized, certainly past my daughter’s usual dinnertime.

We were on the outskirts of Carpinteria, one of my favorite beach towns in all California. The Santa Claus Lane exit came up on my right and I took it. There was a place we had stopped at before and I knew she liked it.

There’s something quintessentially “Santa Barbarian” about the Beach Grill at Padaro, close to the railroad tracks and the beach on Santa Claus Lane. To say that it’s “laid back” is an understatement. You enter and scan the menu on the wall, including a blackboard listing the daily specials. You place your order and pay in advance. Then you’re handed a small plastic disc with a light that flashes when your order is ready.

My daughter ordered macaroni and cheese. I ordered the tortilla soup. We took our plastic disc and went outside to the Beach Grill’s alfresco “dining room.” It is a large grassy swath of park, dotted with picnic tables. There is a sandy area especially for the kids, with things to climb and swing on. Spillage is not a problem. The dress code is extremely forgiving.

We found a picnic table and waited for the light to blink. When it did, I went and got our food. The tortilla soup was a little salty, but my daughter had no complaints about the macaroni and cheese.

We ate at a leisurely pace. Daylight was slowly fading, but a good feeling prevailed, a late Sunday afternoon sort of “happy-tired.” The picnic tables were full of families. The cries and laughter of children at play filled the air.

We finished our dinner, but were still reluctant to call it a day. There was still light left. We left the restaurant and drove further into Carpinteria, all the way to the edge of the town and the start of the beautiful state beach, where I once camped out on a memorable childhood vacation.


My daughter is an ocean child – she finds it difficult to be near the sea without at least getting her feet wet in the surf. As the sun turned into a tiny golden ball on the western horizon, she got her wish. Afterward, as we trudged back through the sand to the car, she took my hand.

“I like spending time with you, Dad.” She flashed me a bright smile. It was then that I noticed the resemblance, stronger and more apparent than ever before – Irish eyes.

Night had fallen. We found the freeway again and followed the luminous red flow of taillights all the way home to Los Angeles.