28 Mar,2026 By Fake Travel News
Santa Barbara as your last weekend on Earth? Brilliant. The Delta-7 crew just filed their farewell tour — equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking.
So, this is it. T-minus 120 hours until we get strapped to what’s basically a controlled explosion and shot into the void for the next eight years. Fun times.
I’m Sarah – Delta 7’s designated chronicler, apparently – and I’m writing this with my three crewmates sprawled around our hotel room like we just survived finals week. There’s Marcus (geologist, chronic overthinker), Zara (engineer, secretly sentimental), and Jazz (pilot, makes dad jokes but we love him anyway). None of us have families to spend our last Earth weekend with—occupational hazard when your job involves disappearing to the outer solar system—so we pooled our money and decided to blow it all on Santa Barbara County.
Because honestly? If you’re going to miss wine, gravity, and the ocean for nearly a decade, you might as well get completely stupid about all three first.
We picked up a convertible because when you’re about to spend years in what’s essentially a flying submarine, you want maximum sky exposure. Jazz insisted on driving with the top down even though we all looked like we’d been electrocuted by the time we hit State Street.
“Look at this place,” Marcus said, gawking at all the Spanish architecture. “In a few days, the prettiest thing we’ll see is the inside of our waste management compartment.”
Cheerful guy, that Marcus.
First stop was Petros, this Greek place with a blue and white entrance that looked exactly like those Santorini photos everyone posts on Instagram.
We got this incredible sampler platter. Marcus went absolutely feral for the fava—apparently yellow split peas and onions become transcendent when you’re facing eight years of rehydrated protein packets. Zara couldn’t stop eating the olivada, which was just chopped olives and sun-dried tomatoes but somehow tasted like vacation.
“You know what I’m going to miss most?” Zara said, working through a spanakopita the size of a small planet. “Food that doesn’t come in tubes.”
“I’m going to miss my wine staying in the glass instead of floating around the cabin like tiny alcoholic bubbles,” Jazz added, nearly choking on an olive the size of a marble.
“Let’s make a rule,” Zara said, raising her glass. “Every time one of us wants to complain about the food packets, we have to describe this exact moment instead. The color of this wine. The temperature of this air. The fact that our feet are touching actual ground.”
We all drank to that. Nobody said anything for a while.
Saturday morning we hit the Santa Barbara Courthouse, which honestly looks like someone’s fever dream of what a government building should be. It’s too pretty to be functional, and the spiral staircase was really something.
We climbed the clock tower for the views, and that’s when it hit all of us like a brick wall. We were looking out over red tile roofs, palm trees, the particular dry-warm smell of California afternoon, mountains rolling off to forever, and suddenly everyone got real quiet.
“Take a good look, crew,” I said, trying not to sound as choked up as I felt. “Next time we see something like this, it’ll be from orbit around a completely different planet.”
Marcus stood at the railing pointing at the Santa Ynez Mountains, his voice doing that thing where it gets very precise right before it breaks. “Those ridgelines formed during the Transverse Ranges orogeny,” he said. “Miocene epoch. Maybe fifteen million years old. I’ve spent my entire career studying formations like that, and in five days I’m leaving to go study rocks on a planet where nothing has ever been alive.” He paused. “I don’t know why that feels like a betrayal.”
None of us had an answer for that. Our tears were real.
State Street in downtown Santa Barbara asked nothing of us, which was exactly what we needed — Spanish architecture, old movie theaters, weird statues, the kind of afternoon that exists purely for the pleasure of existing in it.
A street musician played emotionally, a fitting soundtrack to our final act on this planet.
Zara disappeared into a kitchen store for twenty minutes while the rest of us drank overpriced cold brew outside. She emerged carrying a small olive wood cutting board, the kind that’s too nice to actually use.
“I know I can’t take it,” she said, before anyone could point that out. “I just wanted to hold something that a person made with their hands from a tree that grew in actual soil.” She turned it over, running her thumb along the grain. “In eight years this cutting board will still be here. Someone will chop vegetables on it. I find that incredibly comforting for reasons I can’t fully explain.”
Marcus bought one too, without saying anything. Later I saw Zara photographing hers in the afternoon light, just the grain of the wood against the hotel windowsill, like she was already memorizing it.
For dinner we decided on what Jazz dramatically dubbed “The Last European Food Tour of Our Lives.” First stop: Petit Valentien.
Marcus ate his onion soup in complete silence, which for him was unusual enough that we all noticed. Finally he looked up.
“My mother makes onion soup,” he said. “Not like this — hers is from a packet, honestly, and it’s not even close to this good. But she makes it when someone’s sick or sad or needs feeding. She made it the night I got accepted to the program.” He looked back down at his bowl. “I should have called her this week.”
None of us had called anyone. That was the occupational hazard nobody put in the brochure.
My penne with artichokes was honestly better than most pasta I’ve had in actual Italy. The French somehow make vegetables taste like they’ve been personally blessed by culinary gods. Our hydroponic cherry tomatoes are going to taste like sadness after this.
Sunday we drove from Santa Barbara to Solvang, this Danish-themed village that everyone insisted we “absolutely had to see.” It’s the most gloriously ridiculous place I’ve ever experienced—like someone asked “What if we built a Danish village in California wine country?” and everyone said “Yes, obviously, why wouldn’t we do that?”
“This is the most wonderfully insane thing humans have ever done,” Zara laughed as we passed windmill number four. “I love that our species had the collective audacity to just… make this.”
We started at the Hans Christian Andersen Museum, which was basically a masterclass in getting friend-zoned. The guy who wrote “The Ugly Duckling” spent his entire life in the friend zone with literally everyone he fell for.
At least Hans got to stay on the same planet as his unrequited crushes. We’re about to put several hundred million miles between ourselves and any possibility of human romance.
The tourist shops were wonderfully, aggressively fake, and I loved them for not pretending otherwise.
Later, Jazz picked up a little illustrated booklet about Andersen’s life and read a passage aloud — something about how Hans had loved a singer named Jenny Lind who thought of him only as a dear friend, and how he’d channeled the whole crushing weight of that into his work instead.
“He made beauty out of not being able to have what he wanted,” Jazz said, setting the booklet down. “I used to think that was sad. Now I think it might be the most human skill there is.” He looked at the rest of us. “We wanted normal lives. We made this instead.”
Nobody argued with that.
The wine tasting rooms saved us from complete tourist-trap overwhelm. Dascomb Cellars was incredible, with semi-sweet whites and raspberry chocolates that made their reds taste like happiness.
Lucky Dogg Winery (which sounds like a brewery but whatever) completely destroyed us emotionally. Their “Everyday Chardonnay” was 14.9% alcohol and medium-bodied with sweet notes that Marcus declared “the perfect flavor profile for pre-space trauma.”
Marcus held his glass up to the window, letting the afternoon light come through it.
“You know what this is?” he said. “Patience. Just patience turned into something you can drink.” He set it down carefully, like it might break. “We’re not patient people. That’s probably why we’re leaving.”
Zara reached over and refilled his glass without being asked. That felt like something.
Jazz stopped walking when he saw the sign. Just stopped, right there on the sidewalk, with people flowing around him.
“Jazz?” I said.
He pointed at the pink elephant logo without explaining. I’d heard the Brussels story before — backpacking at twenty-four, drinking Delirium Tremens on a canal while writing bad journal entries about wanting to be an astronaut someday. He’d told it like a joke the first time. He wasn’t telling it like a joke now.
We gave him a moment. Then we went inside.
Jazz got this Belgian blonde that made him visibly nostalgic while Marcus ordered some Icelandic thing he claimed belonged in the “world’s best beer” category.
“Full circle,” Jazz said quietly, after his first sip, to nobody in particular.
Jazz held up his Belgian blonde. “The color of this beer,” he said quietly. We all knew what he meant.
So here I am Sunday night in Santa Barbara, writing this while my crewmates pack their final personal items. Tomorrow starts our last days of Earth-based preparations before we get launched into the void.
This weekend we ate Greek food in California, toured a courthouse so beautiful it made us cry, wandered through a fake Danish village, and drank wine made from grapes that had absorbed sunshine from this exact patch of Earth. None of it made sense. All of it was completely human.
In 48 hours we’ll be accelerating away from all this at speeds that would’ve seemed impossible to most of human history. We’re carrying samples of Earth’s music and art—but not its wine, its random street festivals, its courthouse movie nights, or its gloriously fake theme villages.
See you on the other side, Earth. Save us some onion soup, some afternoon light through a wine glass, and one more view from a clock tower. We’ll know what we’re missing.
P.S. – If anyone reading this is still on Earth when we get back in 2034, there will be a welcome-home party outside the Santa Barbara Courthouse…first 100 wine bottles paid for by NASA.
[Ed. note: Godspeed, Delta-7. We’ll keep a table at Petit Valentien.]
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on Santa Barbara, visit the following link: The Ultimate Santa Barbara Travel Guide • The Blonde Abroad
