Road Trip! Days Six and Seven

After one more brief adventure through some Sierra Nevada towns in California — including Truckee, Nevada City and Grass Valley (and what a great bunch of towns they all are) — we headed off to the latter portion of our trip, which was to do some college visits for Ricky.

First we stopped at UC Davis:

Nice campus! It was hot, but I loved the pine trees on campus and the sprawling greenbelts, and Ricky seemed to love the fact that you could walk to the football stadium, the really cool rec center/pool area, and the overall bicycle/outdoorsy atmosphere:

Davis also has a really terrific “college town,” with several streets in a historic downtown filled with bars, pizza places, sandwich joints, movie theaters, hotels, yogurt shops, a train station, and — yes — MORE bikes! We all really liked it.

We stayed overnight there, then the next day had a big breakfast, got back in the car, and drove for miles and miles down to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which we took a quick tour of, then got back in the car and drove another hour or so to UC Santa Barbara:

Another gorgeous campus, though this one is all about palm trees, bougainvillea, ocean breezes, and — gulp — a beautiful beach within walking distance down a short ramp! I don’t think I ever would have gotten any studying done if I’d gone there! So pretty.

Lots of bikes and surfboards, too. We caught a guy going by with both in the background here: