a hike for my valentine

Hi all! I hope you had a fantastic weekend (those of you still on your three-day weekend: boo! Tim had to work today so it's back to life as usual in this house). Did you do anything fun for Valentine's day? Like I said earlier, we don't usually celebrate Valentine's day on the 14th. There are a few reasons to this sort of odd tradition, but the main one is due to our current location.

Tim and I are not really huge crowd people--we can deal with it in small doses but it just tends to stress us out. Gaah! Anyway, with President's day AND Valentine's day falling on the same weekend, people FLOCK to Santa Barbara for romantic getaways. Sweet, and great for tourism I'm sure, but not so great for our neuroses haha. Rather than going to our favorite splurge-y restaurants this year, we went on a sunset hike one day and a picnic the next. There's little my husband likes doing more than exploring the outdoors of this lovely town which we call home. 

Our Valentine's night "hike" was mostly on roads but it took us to a spot above our college campus where you can see all of town. We've gone there a few times since graduation a few years ago, but the last time I'd been was back in 2012 at the end of summer.

 

It's a pretty easy hike but the roads wind back and forth up the side of the mountain, so it's definitely a calf workout! We passed some pretty spectacular and unique Montecito home on the way up, which is always cool. The one above has a wavy mosaic roof! Trippy.

We reached the peak of the mountain at precisely the right moment to enjoy panoramic views of our town at golden hour. Spectacularly breathtaking.

W

 

Thanks to some wild volunteer plants growing on the side of the road, I have two more funky succulents  to add to my quickly-growing collection! haha that spiky one was a pain to carry all the way down the mountain--and yes that pun was intended :)

We cut through campus trails to get back to our car, which is always fun too. One of our first "dates" before we officially started dating was a hike on these same trails :)