San Ysidro Ranch ~ Santa Barbara, California – Today, on the second day of our 10-day Coastal California road trip, we hit the coast of California and arrived at the incredible San Ysidro Ranch.

We began our day in Palm Springs and made a four hour jaunt to the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport to pick up our very good friends Bob and Karen Schroeder (pictured right).

Bob and Karen are nationally recognized builders in Lansing, Michigan, the owners of Mayberry Homes, and have been wonderful friends for a good long time.

This is our second such trip with them meandering the Pacific coast.  We find that they are not only good friends, but very compatible traveling partners.

I think I feel an article stirring inside about finding good travel partners.  Trust me, bad travel partners can be a nightmare directly from the pits of hell.

We piled their luggage  into “Babe the Blue Benz” and made the short trip into the Montecito foothills of Southern California’s wine country where the famous San Ysidro Ranch resides.

As we pulled up the tree-lined entrance we were immediately quite enamored with the fairytale setting and the beautiful bungalows strategically set into the resorts stunning setting.

San Ysidro Ranch is owned by Ty Warner (founder of the Beenie Babies) and  features forty one individually decorated private cottages, suites and rooms winding along San Ysidro’s hillside creek- and tree-lined paths. Built in classic bungalow style, most offer plush king-size beds with fine linens, fireplaces and patios. Recently renovated suites and cottages feature hot tubs on private outdoor patios with outdoor rain showers, hand-cut stone or Old World masonry fireplaces, radiant-heated bathroom floors, flat-screen TVs and hand-selected antique furnishings.

Unbelievable!

Here is a photograph of Bob and Karen’s Lavender cottage that I snagged from San Ysidro’s website.

It was a rainy day here at San Ysidro Ranch.  Therefore, we used the afternoon for our friends to acclimate to the time change with a nap, while we went off to our own cottage to do some planning and writing.

Hopefully we will get some sunshine so that I can get some of my own photographs.

Stay tuned!