Reaching for the Golden Shore.

The week I was in California, we were staying at a small motel on the outskirts of the town my mother-in-law lives in, about 30 miles from Santa Barbara. It was a modest low-slung motel, the kind that you would never stop at if it didn't look kept up. The kind they don't build anymore because it's much easier to stick a pre-fab four or six story concrete block up and smash down a parking lot around it. One story motor lodges are such a waste of space, right?

This particular motel had beautifully tended roses scattered across the grounds and in the morning we'd come out to the car to drive to Santa Barbara and we'd be surrounded by the short mountains of the Coastal Range, the sun breaking across one end of the valley to throw shadows on the hillsides on the other end. The strong-angled hills create sharp contrasts and highlights in the sun. Avocado and citrus trees grow in the valley and up the hillsides, and local residents often set up roadside stands where you pay on the honor system. We bought lemons as big as grapefruit 4 for a dollar. Avocados were 2 for a dollar.

US 101 spends much of its time near Santa Barbara running parallel to Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway. Sometimes they merge. You look out at the Pacific and the oil rigs and the Channel Islands. Surfers in their wetsuits dot the waters just south of Carpinteria. At night the only things you see are the lights on the oil rigs.

Everywhere along the western edge of the Coastal Range it looks like the hillside is either getting ready to slide or just did. In La Conchita a massive landslide last year killed several people. The mounds of earth are still there covering the houses and white crosses stand on top of the mounds. La Conchita is about ten blocks long and three blocks wide, nestled between the 101 and the base of Red Mountain.

La Conchita is an established community that dates to 1924. Northwest of Los Angeles, at least once you get clear of Thousand Oaks, development slows down a bit. It's not like Orange County, where development has turned that county from an orchard into a nightmare -- or the place of our television fantasies (which are curiously much whiter and wealthier than the real Orange County). Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties have strong environmental groups that put the brakes on much ill-advised development. The trade-off however is that in Santa Barbara, real estate prices are beyond belief (not that Orange County is a cheap place to live, either). Check out this nifty 2 bedroom for only $1,020,000.