California Blogging, Part 5

Santa Barbara is a beautiful upscale town. Today we visited the Mission Santa Barbara, pictured below. Unfortunately, I forgot to recharge my digital camera and those are the only pics I’ll be posting today. I took some more with my 35mm camera but you know how that goes, it’ll be a couple of weeks before I drop them off and get them back from the lab.

Anyway we went down to Stearns Wharf and they were filming a short film. It seems that the nearby Brooks Institute of Photography has a film school and they won a grant from Kodak to film a short motion picture. Kodak provides money and 35mm motion picture film (which is very expensive). Anyway, my wife and I were recruited to be extras. I shouldn’t have agreed to it because I know (working in advertising) how much of filmmaking is just standing around waiting for the crew to get everything just right. We stayed around for one set-up. In the scene a woman is standing on one of the pier’s pilings as if she’s about to jump and a crowd gathers. Say hello to crowd member numbers 31 and 32. If we don’t end up on the cutting room floor you’ll see our backs. The name of the film is Love’s Devotion Forever. From what little we were able to glean it’s a about a stalker.

After we snuck out of there, we drove up the spectacular coast to the town of Solvang, a Danish village, which is where Ronal Reagan used to vote when he lived on his nearby ranch. There were no Muslims protesting the Danes in Solvang. On the contrary it was very peaceful. We drove past “The Hitching Post” which was in the movie Sideways. We also learned that the nearby town of Buellton is the “home of split pea soup”. We continued our drive to today’s destination, Pismo Beach. We’re staying at a resort called “The Cliffs” which appropriately enough is on a series of bluffs overlooking the ocean. Long drive tomorrow.