Santa Barbara with some Ami's

The forecast was looking good on Monday so we headed down to the beach in the morning with Dani to check it out. The conditions were beautiful, quite small but glassy and smooth waves where ever you looked. I surfed for more than two hours and was still hungry for more when Bekki and Dani signaled that we had to go because Dani had to do some work. She left us her car though so we could go again later on. We only needed to send a package with our stuff back to Germany and decided to do that before we surfed again. Because our stuff was at Kenny's place we drove there, packed our things together and went looking for the nearest post office. We struggled a little trying to fit everything into the small but hellish expensive box. I had hoped that we could just leave it there and go surfing but the woman at the counter pinned us down and asked us all these stupid questions (I was sure that it was meant nicely...) and took soooo long to type in our details. We ended up being there for over a hour talking to one of the slowest people on this planet. I kept looking outside where the sun was already setting and got  really nervous and jumpy but she wouldn't let us go. She didn't even notice that we were in such a hurry and to crown it all her computer had some sort of problem which stalled us down even more. By the end of the procedure it was far too late to go back to the beach and I was so bummed because we missed a great surf session but I was also exhausted from being mad. The sunset was beautiful though and the drive back to Dani along the coast was very nice. We watched "The Motorcycle Diaries" while eating another pumpkin dinner and started dreaming about traveling again. I really loved that movie, it makes you dream, think and laugh, sometimes even at the same time.
Dani and I went for a very early morning surf on Tuesday, the day we wanted to finally leave LA and travel north, not because we didn't like it there but because we wanted to see something new (after all we are travelers). The waves were still fun and it was so nice to be out there while the sun rose with only a few other people out and no wind.
We left from Kenny's at nine where we said goodbye to Dani and Liz, Kenny's mum who had taken the best care of us while we were there, and boarded Mike's truck together with him and Kenny. We had planned to go to Santa Barbara together where we wanted to spend the day and then take the train north to San Luis Obispo. The drive was about two hours and I had a good time in the front seat talking to Mike while Bekki and Kenny napped in the back.
The first thing we did in SB was to check out the bus and train times before we continued following the plan that we had made on the way, or rather that Kenny and Mike had agreed on because they wanted to show us the worlds best crepe- and coffee place. We liked the idea (who would say no to crepes and coffee) and followed them to a tiny shop not far from the main street that had a great variety of sweet and savory crepes which made it very hard to decide what to get. Everything looked so good...
I ended up with a simple Nutella crepe (I hadn't had Nutella in what seemed years) which was really good but I would have taken the one Kenny chose if I had known how it tasted before. I don't quite recall what was in it but there were some veggies and cheese and it tasted divine! I won't even try to go into detail because there is no way that I can describe it...
After the crepes we only had to go a few doors down the street to get to the "Santa Barbara Roasting Co" which apparently had the best coffee in the world. They definitely had a lot of different blends and good prices with a free refill, I think... The coffee was really good, even though I wouldn't call it the best and we drank a lot of their extra strong blend and also tasted our way through the other flavors which led to a strong  caffeine overdose that affected Kenny the most. As we left he used the "I work at Disneyland" phrase on a girl which always seems to work and in the car on the way to the beach he wouldn't stop talking, so fast and loud that no one was able to interrupt him. It was entertaining but didn't last very long before all of us got really tired. The boys took us to the pier from where we watched the sunset and took some pictures before we had to go to the train station. The trains in the US aren't even a little better than the DB and they told us that we would have to wait an hour for the train. We just stayed at the station and killed the time by playing Pinball on Kenny's 3DS. The train arrived on time, exactly one hour late, and we finally had to say goodbye to the last of our good friends. It was a very sentimental moment because we had had a really good time with both of them and had become close mates. The train helped us though by closing its doors and we could only wave, I with a hoody-poncho that Kenny had given me (one of mine was still at his place), until the train started moving and we left them behind.
The train ride was three hours but we had a lot of room and Bekki watched a movie while I read my book. We arrived 30 minutes early in SLO, it was dark and quite cold but we soon got picked up by our next hosts.
It had been a really nice day, one of the best we've had in CA, and Bekki and I both felt very lucky and special to have met all of these great people that had made our time here so special and unique and we felt that it wasn't the last time that we would see them.

Only a little bit of coffee...