A quick midsummer passion project for a big milestone: July 2024 marks two decades of calling Ventura home. Back in 2004 my wife and I moved down from UCSB/Isla Vista, having each landed careers in this area, and settled down in this SoCal beach town that’s both like and unlike the SoCal beach towns we grew up in. I’m commemorating that with a one-off t-shirt, because why not?
I got to know Ventura once I began biking around town, first to discover it and then regularly for exercise a few years later. The town is bisected by freeways, and a ride around its perimeter is just over 30 miles. Ventura’s city limits are perforated by farm fields, so I chose to make a more filled-in shape, bound by the ocean, the hillsides, and the Santa Clara River. The shirt’s version is offset substantially from a conventional north-south orientation, both to be bigger and because north is relative.
My take on Ventura’s neighborhoods first appeared as the final piece in my (now-archived) 2018 “March Mapness” Instagram series, hand-drawn with names pulled from my own knowledge, Google Maps, and Open Street Map. To a Ventura native it may not be 100% accurate, and while 20 years won’t make me a native, I’m pretty sure I qualify as local, so…artistic license? It’s personal, one of a kind, and not for sale…yet, or maybe ever. We’ll see. Anyway, twenty years! Blink and it’s gone, folks.
