Santa Barbara and Santa Monica

After the excitement at Monterey, it was on to Santa Barbara where I spent an easy night, got a workout in the next morning and headed out to Santa Monica for a couple nights.  While there, I met up with a friend who works for SpaceX near LA and I got to take a tour of the rocket factory there.  SpaceX is an interesting company as they do all of their own fabrication and manufacturing in house.  Their primary products, the Falcon series of rockets, are cutting edge and very efficient rockets.  I found out that they actually filmed a lot of the Iron Man 2 movie in the very factory that I got to tour, so that was an awesome bonus.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take pictures inside, but suffice it to say that it was pretty awesome.  Look for the company to do big things in the years to come.

Sadly, my plans of seeing a couple other friends were foiled due either to sickness or conflicts in schedules, but after spending over three weeks touring the West coast (and putting up with the ridiculous prices and taxes on everything), I was looking forward to beginning my eastward travels.  So it was off to Tucson...