Our neighbor here at Rancho Oso Thousand Trails is a nice guy named Rolf who stops by once in a while for short chats. Weirdly, his second wife also lives here in the park, but two tiers up the hill in a different trailer. Rolf says they are good friends but can’t live together so a couple days back Wife #2 loaded up her stuff and took off for the Las Vegas area to be near her kids. Rolf is not a Vegas fan so he held on here. When we were chatting with him the other day, he suggested a restaurant called Lure’s in Santa Barbara.
Today we hopped into Charlotte and took off on a trip to Lure’s for lunch. There is construction near the State Street address for the restaurant so traffic was formidable, especially coupled with an abundance of impatient rich people barging into traffic with their expensive cars, old people hesitating just enough to stop everyone’s progress and traffic signals that only go green when the intersection is clogged with cars pointing in all directions.
After only two blocks, we were able to get off State and pull into the giant plaza where Lure’s stands. It is an impressive-looking place with almost Italian styling on the outside. It is attractive inside, too, and there are a variety of seating options – raised tables with bar stools, big easy chairs, a long counter, outside seating and many wide-screen TVs that have the closed captioning turned on. The really good part about Lure’s was the seafood. Their chowders were fabulous. I had New England style and is was absolutely the best I have ever been served. Very creamy with tons of clams and hardly any filler (celery). Peggy tried the Veracruz style chowder, very little of which I stole, and we were both impressed with it, too. Again, heavy on the clams which has not been the case in most of the seafood restaurant chowders we have had on this passage down the Pacific coast.
I had fish and shrimp served with fries and a terrific pineapple slaw. Peggy toughed it out with fish and chips and the same slaw and our food was great. They also served us some pretty good beer. Our bill, including chowder, drinks and tip was about $65.
On the way back over the pass we pulled off to drive down Stagecoach Road, past the Cold Creek Tavern and under the Cold Creek Arch Bridge. The weather was nice, there are birds everywhere and the scenery was great. We spotted some more turkeys on the way home. I like turkeys. Maybe they are relatives.
See pix. Click here