Coastal Adventure - Part II: Solvang

As I mentioned last week, my friend C and I have been talking about taking a little trip to Solvang for a super long time now, and finally did it.

In case you aren't familiar, Solvang is a town in Santa Barbara County/Santa Ynez Valley that was founded by Danish settlers in the early 20th century.  It's pretty cute if you like wooden shoes and windmills and flowers and charming things.  If you don't, you're probably dead inside.  Just kidding.

I will say this much - there isn't a lot to do in Solvang besides check out cute little shops and eat pastries.  I wouldn't recommend going for more than a couple of days, but I found that two evenings and one solid day of roaming around was sufficient for adventuring, buying silly souvenirs, eating, walking, and taking photos.

We picked the perfect time to go.  The weather was gorgeous, but since it was a weekday, there weren't tons and tons of tourists to compete with.

Click through for more photos.

Sadly, I didn't take as many photos as I ought to have done.  In hindsight, I'd have photographed more food, of which there was a lot. Or taken at least one photo of a windmill. Also,  I will apologize again for the horrible indoor photos.  Stupid iPhone camera.

Anyhow, we started our day by wandering over to the Mission Santa Ynez.  We didn't go inside because we didn't feel like paying the admission fee, but the outside was pretty cool.

One of the original arches of the mission:

Look at these views!

We also went to the Hans Christian Andersen Museum, which, as it turns out, is the top floor of a bookstore and roughly the same size as my bedroom at home.  It was packed full of interesting little tidbits, though.

For one, they had a giant bust of the author/artist, which, obviously, I had to take a photo with.

These were the only wooden shoes I could find, which was disappointing because I couldn't try them on:

The Little Mermaid Fountain is topped with a replica of the statue in Copenhagen.

Oh finally, a wooden shoe to try on.  I felt like Cinderella.

C hamming it up.  At this point in the day, we were wandering around looking for lunch, and a little loopy with low blood sugar.

We ended up at Solvang Restaurant for sandwiches and my introduction to aebelskivers.

We had dinner at a tapas place, which they opened just for our little party of two.  We had amazing paella, serrano ham, sangria, and other Spanish goodies.

The next morning, we packed up and left for home, after a stop for danishes.

To round out this post, here are some photos of me interacting with statues on past trips, as I mentioned before that I am prone to doing.

The assault dummy at my dad's Kung Fu studio in Oklahoma City:

The cat fountain at Betsy Ross's home in Philadelphia:

The Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, NYC.

Okay now you're all caught up.  Next week, back to the usual roundup of stuff I'm working on, Friday favorites, etc.

Have a great weekend!