Being in Santa Barbara, one of the highest-traffic tourist towns on the scenic California coast, required visiting a few art, science, and history museums, a passion of my wife Caroline's. The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, founded in 1916, was next on our list of places to see, and this is one that I was looking forward to because natural history is my nirvana.
The museum is unique as it is off the beaten path — not in the downtown area but about a half-mile directly north of the Santa Barbara Mission in an isolated oak tree forested and native-scrub-wooded campus location, almost deserted in the rolling hills below the Santa Ynez Mountains that are part of the geologic western Transverse Ranges.
Excitement was in the air as I parked the car between oak trees in a large asphalt paved parking lot constructed over rolling terrain, seemingly as an afterthought to save certain oak or pine trees. We walked past the first blue whale over 70 feet long that I have ever seen up close preserved as a skeleton for public display. Yes, that did take our breath away.