Santa Barbara & Book of Mormon

Once upon a time I bought tickets to see Book of Mormon while I was in Canada. And I conveniently forgot the day I bought tickets for and missed the show. It's a long story and one that still hurts, but earlier this year AJ and I bought tickets for us to go see it when it came to LA-ish in Thousand Oaks.

We decided to make a weekend of it. I cashed in some hotel points for a free room up north, and because it was Bastille Day weekend (July 14th, France's "independence" day), we were in town to check out the Santa Barbara French festival too!

I should note it's a very humble festival but it is the cutest little festival there ever was. I think there's a relatively big population of French in the area, and this was it's 31st year going! I found out about it in the summer of 2006, when I was preparing to go abroad for the academic year and we were in an orientation and I met Katie Rose, who would become one of my best friends and my roommate out there. I think she knew about it, and she and I went to it together... 13 years ago now! So I dragged AJ up there with me. It was the perfect opportunity for him to wear his new shirt that I bought for him on some of my recent travels- but no one commented on it!

That's us in front of their little replica
Eiffel Tower haha

Nevermind Da Vinci was Italian

Guillotine! So French

Downing a Nutella crêpe om nom nom

The festival is cute. They have lots of food including crêperies and wine and bakeries with baguettes. They sold shirts and berets and scarves. There were travel companies and French renaissance re-enactments and French facts and lots of live French music, can-can dancers, accordion players, French conversation corners, and my favorite that we sadly missed, the canine cavalry. It was wa nice day!

Otherwise we wandered around downtown Santa Barbara and up and down State Street and I relived all my college memories and made some new ones. Santa Barbara is heaven on earth!

The next day we watched Wimbledon (my God what a match!) and we were both going for Federer so that was a hard one to watch, and then we went and saw Book of Mormon at the Thousand Oaks Civic Center.

Let me just say that AJ in his jeans and button-up shirt, and me in my summer dress... somehow we were way overdressed. Was it the weather, the place, the matinee, or just the fact that American culture has gone downhill? We were tempted to go change into our pajamas because everyone else was seriously that sloppy! Whatever.

We both really enjoyed it (it's a good one!) but Hamilton is still the superior musical.

It was loverly to get home to our animals after the weekend away!