Wednesday, Oct 12

The past two nights I have not had any practical Internet access at my hotel despite both advertising “free high speed Internet”. On Monday the access was just impossibly slow and on Tuesday the network was misconfigured to allocate IP addresses for 7 days. This means that, even though a device may have left the hotel 6 days ago, its IP address is not available. Unsurprisingly, there were no IP addresses left for new connections and, when I explained the problem and asked them to re-start the router, the receptionist’s response was “this happens all the time – just keep trying”. I was not impressed.

I sort of plan for the occasional lack of Internet by booking a couple of nights ahead but I’ve never lost two consecutive nights of connectivity before so I had to go to Starbucks to update the blog, decide what to do later in the day and book a hotel for tonight. Well, Buellton must be the only city in southern California without a Starbucks so I headed south to Santa Barbara and made one cup of coffee last well over an hour.

Since I’m not a beach person I decided to spend some time in downtown Santa Barbara which is very attractive and relaxing. My main focus was the historic (1929) County Courthouse which is a beautiful building in the colonial courtyard style. This is still the active California Superior Courthouse and must be one of the nicest in the country. The public have fairly free run of the building, including the viewing tower. The clock mechanism and bells are housed in an delightful space, complete with murals, that can be viewed as you climb the stairs to the tower.

After that I drove along the coast to Port Hueneme for an early check-in so I could plan the next few days. For those (like me) who have never heard of Port Hueneme, you may want to check out the map and video here.

Santa Barbara’s beautiful courthouse.
The waiting area outside the courtrooms is elegant, cool and overlooks the central courtyard with views of the surrounding mountains.

Everything in the downtown area is built to blend in with the colonial style – even the parking garage.
Although the view of the coast from the viewing tower was obscured by cloud I stopped a little further down the Pacific Coast Highway and snapped this shot from the side of the road.