Santa Barbara Urban Wine Trail
Santa Barbara's Urban Wine Trail is unique. Follow it and you get to explore Santa Barbara from elegant State Street and the historic El Paseo shopping center where you will find Grassini, Au Bon Climat and Margerum, to the outskirts of the Funk Zone where Carr resides in it's Quonsit hut making you feel like you've walked right into a barrel. Cross the train tracks and stop by AVA Santa Barbara where you can taste wines from all the AVA's in the area and see the huge Elkpen mural mapping out the unique climate, soils and history of the AVA's. Stroll down the block and stop at Santa Barbara Winery one of the very first in this area. Anacapa Street is teaming with tasting rooms like Oreana, Kunin and of course Municipal Wine Makers which looks like a dive shop and has a wall of filing cabinets. As you stroll between the tasting rooms take in the Funk zone with it's murals and small artist shops and galleries. The Santa Barbara Surf Museum is there as well as plenty of surfboard and dive shops. Keep walking and you will hit the beach. Grab a segway or a bike or just walk the beach. Head out on to the wharf and visit the Aquarium or just enjoy watching the fishermen. Stop by Conway Family Vineyards Deep Sea tasting room with a 2nd story patio to enjoy the view with a glass of wine. Don't miss sunset at the end of the wharf and the parade of boats returning to the marina. It makes for a perfect day...although 2 would be even better.
Auburn Coach Wife Kristi Malzahn Agrees with Match & eHarmony: Men are Jerks
My advice is this: Settle! That's right. Don't worry about passion or intense connection. Don't nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling Bravo! in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It's hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who's changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)
Obviously, I wasn't always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry's Kids aren't going to walk, even if you send them money. It's not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it's downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.
Even situation comedies, starting in the 1970s with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and going all the way to Friends, feature endearing single women in the dating trenches, and there's supposed to be something romantic and even heroic about their search for true love. Of course, the crucial difference is that, whereas the earlier series begins after Mary has been jilted by her fiancé, the more modern-day Friends opens as Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn't feeling it. But either way, in episode after episode, as both women continue to be unlucky in love, settling starts to look pretty darn appealing. Mary is supposed to be contentedly independent and fulfilled by her newsroom family, but in fact her life seems lonely. Are we to assume that at the end of the series, Mary, by then in her late 30s, found her soul mate after the lights in the newsroom went out and her work family was disbanded? If her experience was anything like mine or that of my single friends, it's unlikely.
And while Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of Friends, do we feel confident that she'll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It's equally questionable whether Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)