Weird day trips from Santa Barbara
The strangest Santa Barbara finds are often a short drive out. These 11 day trips — Lulu Hyggelig (Thomas Dambo Troll) — California Nature Art Museum, Bizarre Antiques & Oddities, Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.
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Lulu Hyggelig (Thomas Dambo Troll) — California Nature Art Museum
Built from over 80 wooden pallets and 30 wine barrels donated by local wineries, "Lulu" is Danish recycling-a…
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Bizarre Antiques & Oddities
Owner Erin Binger — who taught herself taxidermy by preserving her kid's dead guinea pig in a jar — fills the…
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Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts
The preserved adobe home and working ceramics studio of Beatrice Wood, the 'Mama of Dada' who modeled for Mar…
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Gaviota Hot Springs (Las Cruces Hot Springs)
A rock-and-concrete soaking basin built by WPA crews in the 1930s sits in a genuinely jungly little canyon on…
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OstrichLand USA
A 33-acre roadside farm devoted entirely to two flightless birds — roughly 80 ostriches plus a smaller flock…
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The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille — Dunes Center
In 1923 Cecil B. DeMille built a full-scale plaster Egyptian city on the dunes for the silent "Ten Commandmen…
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Hans Christian Andersen Museum
A free-to-browse second floor above a Danish-village bookstore holds hundreds of volumes of Hans Christian An…
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La Purisima Mission
California's only fully reconstructed mission complex — you can walk into every room, no ropes — sits where,…
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Coquina Mine
Located in the Marr Ranch Open Space of Simi Valley, the Coquina Mine is an abandoned 1930s limestone quarry…
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Asphaltum Mine
Established in the late 1890s by the Alcatraz Asphalt Company, the Asphaltum Mine was a major source of natur…
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Benjamin Foxen Adobe Ruins
Built in 1837 by English sea captain Benjamin Foxen, this historic adobe home once served as the heart of the…