Day 11: Santa Barbara, CA

Ok, I apologize for not posting last night! I'll explain all that happened...

We got off to a late start to the day not leaving the hotel til around 10 a.m. Then, we went to an urgent care center (called 'Doctors on Duty') to find out what was wrong with my eye and get medicine (it started to get worse overnight). Luckily, the place we went to took Tricare (our insurance) and we sat and waited for about 45 minutes until I was seen by a doctor.

The doctor came in for a 2 WHOLE minutes, looked at my eye, told me it was infected and prescribed me some antibiotic eye drops. We spent another hour and half talking to 8 people on the phone with our insurance and Elmendorf (our base in Alaska) to make sure that we wouldn't have to pay for the visit. It's hard to explain, and it's boring, so basically we were annoyed with talking to so many people who all told us several different things to do. It was frustrating and took up the bulk of our day.


We arrived in Santa Barbara (about a 3 1/2 hour drive) around 4 p.m. and ate late lunch. I wanted to go to Santa Barbara Winery (a winery I visited in 2006) and do a tasting. We made it just in time, a little before 5 p.m. (which is when it closed), to do a tasting. The tasting cost $5 and we got to taste six wines (they actually gave us a free one, and I asked to try two more, so we tried nine). Klay and I tend to sway more toward white wines instead of reds, and we already had bought three white wines, so we were trying to find a red we liked. We ended up buying two red wines at the Syrah and a ZCS.

Then, we walked across the street to do another tasting at Oreana Winery. It was $6 for six wines and was a really cool place! In the photo of Klay and I, we were about to drink the "Eliminator" which has 20% alcohol content. It was a little strong for me, but wasn't too bad.



A block away from Oreana, was another winery, which gave a whopping 11 tastings for $8. Their wines we weren't to crazy about. But we met some friendly folks who suggested some places to stop at in Los Angeles.

Our hotel was right around the corner and I'd already started getting a headache. I thought about blogging, but when Klay got out the computer, we apparently had to pay money for Wifi! I went ahead and went to sleep (although I probably wouldn't have blogged any way; the wine got the best of me). I woke up with a massive migraine, took some medicine, went back to sleep and woke up just peachy (literally no headache or anything)! Needless to say we didn't stop at any more wineries before leaving Santa Barbara.

But Klay and I really had fun and have learned a lot more about wine on our trip!



Stay tuned for more "From the Road..."

Santa Barbara on Dwellable

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