A Drive to Santa Barbara

Before leaving California, we took a day to drive up to Santa Barbara. How many ways can you say G.O.R.G.E.O.U.S.???? To begin with, the temperature was in the 80's!!

We drove through our very loved Ventura County. The beauty of the strawberry fields and orange groves filled our senses!

Then we went to Montecito, a community of secluded mansions with fragrant trees and shrubbery lining the winding roadway, and home of Westmont College, Rich's alma mater, as well as Brett's and Esther's.

A few years ago a terrible fire swept through the campus, burning faculty housing, old buildings and quonset huts (where Rich had classes in the 60's), and trees. The campus has since seen new buildings erected, gardens replanted, and generally made even more magnificent than before. So out of the ashes ...

Rich stands at one of the new buildings. The Pacific Ocean is in the background, even though at the time there was a layer of fog, but the view is incredible nonetheless. You can see the ocean from many points of the campus!

New buildings for the visual and performing arts. Far cry from the old quonset huts!!

New gardens were so fragrant with plantings of sage, rosemary, oregano among the ferns and flowering plants. Truly a gardener's delight!

A new observatory was built.

The fire ripped right through this canyon. New athleltic fields were built. Again, a fabulous view of the ocean and the Channel Islands!

Fourtunately there were dorms and buildings saved from the fire!

Kerrwood Hall, the original mansion. Westmont began in the 1940's in downtown Los Angeles but moved to this location by Mrs. Kerr, of the Kerr canning jar fame. Kerrwood Hall now houses the administrative offices. Its magnificent interior boasts a library with mahogany walls, now a lovely meeting place.

Beautiful gardens surround Kerrwood.

A corner view of the library - with it's view of the fog-covered ocean! Westmont is a wonderful school, with it's ever-expanding curriculum and truly "golden" opportunities for students to live and serve with a "world-view".

A little prayer chapel is nestled in the woods.

We finished our day with a stop at Santa Barbara's East Beach Park. We enjoyed some special snacks as we watched some beach volleyball. It was truly a shorts and flip flops-kind of day!