Road trip - part 1 (Santa Barbara and Solvang)

Last week we went on our most ambitious journey since Lucas was born - a 6 day road trip up the Pacific coast to San Francisco, driving a few hours each day and stopping at various interesting places on route. We started off driving towards Santa Barbara, which of course meant that we dropped by at the Camarillo outlet mall on the way. Santa Barbara is very pleasant, with a Mediterranean feel due to the architecture. We had a simple alfresco lunch which was surprisingly good - it was a fast food burger place but they had caesar salad with grilled albacore (white tuna). The burger was pretty good too! There was a live band playing at the posh restaurant next door so we got free music. Lucas was in a good mood throughout and we had a relaxing stroll down the main street to the pier. Santa Barbara is a little like Rodeo Drive, lots of nice cars and Harleys and people who look like they just walked off the set of The Bold and the Beautiful. We could not get a reasonably priced hotel in Santa Barbara (even Holiday Inn Express is over $200!), so we took a 45 minute drive to our destination for the night, Solvang.

Solvang was started about a hundred years ago by Danish emigrants from the Midwest and all the buildings without exception look like they were transplanted from Denmark. It is quite a sight, in the middle of California wine country! It happened to be quite chilly when we arrived so that added to the impression that we were in Scandinavia. Just as in Europe, all the shops were already closed by 6pm and we were lucky to find a restaurant that would still serve us dinner at 8pm! It was actually enjoyable for a change to be somewhere that is not on the go 24 hours a day.

The shops did look very interesting though (all family run businesses, no chain stores here) and the next morning we went to check them out - there was a "Christmas shop" selling Christmas tree ornaments and decorations, which even had hard-to-find wood carvings from the Erzgebirge (a region in Germany bordering the Czech republic which not many tourists have been to). There was also a shop selling cuckoo-clocks and beer steins - more Bavarian than Danish but I guess there's a big demand for these items. One of the beer steins was about 3 feet high and cost $1600! Anyway, it's a good thing we had no more space in the car (partly because we had bought stuff again in Camarillo), otherwise I might have been tempted to buy something that would only end up gathering dust at home.

From Solvang we drove on the 101 through wine country towards Cambria and Hearst castle. If you've seen the film Sideways, you'll recognise a lot of the places we drove through. Unfortunately we did not have enough time for any wine tasting, but since it's only about 2 hours drive from Pasadena we can always come back (I know writing this that we probably won't - not because we don't like the place but somehow we always end up going somewhere else instead).

So we survived the first day of the trip quite well and covered quite a bit of ground, considering that we had to stop for feeding and diaper change every now and then! Just a few months ago we couldn't imagine going on a trip like this with Lucas, but it was actually quite enjoyable (for Lucas as well). Everytime we think it's difficult to travel with a baby we just think of how do parents with 2,3 or even more toddlers manage. I guess we'll start to find out once Lucas learns to walk...