Belle and Barbara Take Flight

Part One - To Holm Grove

The first section of the travelogue begins with a hand charting the path of the trip - from New York across the country to northern California, down the California coast, and back via a more southern route, touching down in South Carolina and ending up back in New York. This clip ends in "Holm Grove," the Donohoe estate in Menlo Park, California. The Donohoes were a wealthy family, descended from California pioneers.

Part Two - San Francisco and Treasure Island

Here the plane flies over San Francisco and Treasure Island, the site of the 1939 World's Fair, the Golden Gate International Exposition, built on an artificial island between San Francisco and Oakland. Although the film is degraded, it has interesting glimpses of the exposition from the air. A title slide explains that the next stop is Santa Barbara and "Heart's Desire," perhaps a resort. We see Belle's plane landing and being met by a group of people, so we can assume a friend also has a film camera. At the end of this clip we see shots of the resort.

Part Three - To Santa Barbara

In the third section of the travelogue, Barbara and Belle are having lunch al fresco with a group of friends, presumably at Heart's Desire in Santa Barbara. The lunch crowd is having a grand time, passing film cameras around and making silly faces, providing the viewer with another glimpse of the lives of the privileged. After a series of shots of the friends and the beautifully landscaped villa, the film concludes with a title card reading, "A Western Sunset"...and...