Santa Ynez Valley

Jill's Journal: We spent a truly wonderful week exploring the beautiful Santa Ynez Valley and yet, for all the traipsing around we did, I feel like I got a paltry amount of photos. And the ones I did get didn’t really showcase the loveliness of this place. So, in these days of the web, I spent a few minutes scouring cyberspace and found a few images which captured this area far better than I did.

Lake Cachuma.

The quaint western town of Santa Ynez, the valley’s namesake.

Tiny and charming Ballard.

Los Olivos.

Buellton.

Solvang…

…and another of Solvang, really the signature town of this area.

We also would have loved to try the Danish treat of "aebleskivers" at an authentic Danish bakery. They’re supposed to be light and airy pancake-like balls dusted with powdered sugar and topped with raspberry jam. Apparently people proclaim them a little bit of heaven, but after checking at three different bakeries, we learned it’s common for them to be cooked in peanut oil (something about peanut oil cooking hotter and quicker). Keeping our peanut allergy girl safe immediately trumps any anticipated culinary experience in our book. But if you go, be sure to try them (and please let us know how they are!).

Giant Birds and Tiny Horses

Jill's Journal: Many of the farms in the Santa Ynez Valley welcome visitors and tourists, which is simply bliss for our farm-loving, animal-loving little girls. And while they certainly enjoyed feeding the ostriches and emus at Ostrich Land, Erika, Madelyn, and Victoria went absolutely gaga over the miniature horses at Quicksilver Ranch.

First, the ostriches -- these big birds are not the friendly type and are extremely aggressive eaters, so it actually takes a lot of courage for little kids to offer food to them (and hold the bowl still while the birds attack it). Ostrich Land itself doesn’t hold much charm, but the girls actually remembered quite a bit from the wonderful and informative ostrich breeding farm tour we took last year in Tehachapi. They could identify which birds were female vs. male and remembered quite a few of the unusual facts and breeding information we learned there. Maybe things do sink in!

As fun as it is to feed an ostrich, it doesn’t seem to compare to the wonder these little girls have around miniature horses. Quicksilver Ranch is a breeding farm with a staggering 65 head of minis. I can’t imagine a cuter thing to breed and raise. These little guys and gals are off-the-charts adorable and even the stalls, fencing, and feeders at Quicksilver are mini-sized. A very kind lady at the farm answered several questions for us. Madelyn was especially enamored with “Macho Man,” pint-sized even by mini standards, and Erika fell for a blue-eyed paint. Naturally, they wished with all their hearts to take their picks home. But Victoria? When asked which one she would have liked to take home, she sighed and with a sly grin said, “All of them.”

California’s “Kentucky of the West”

Jill's Journal: We’ve been in the Santa Ynez Valley – which includes the neighboring small towns of Buellton, Solvang, Los Olivos, Ballard, and Santa Ynez itself, all around 15 miles inland and just above Santa Barbara – since Sunday and it took us less than 30 seconds to fall in love with the area. Seriously. The picturesque, rolling hills are dotted with vineyards, but – even better – there’s bucolic horse farms (Thoroughbred, Icelandic, miniature, and more) at every turn. We are smitten. When we spotted literature proclaiming this area the “Kentucky of the west; California’s horse country,” at least that explained why we like it so much. Oh yes, we like it here very, very much.

If we ever decide to call California home again, this is the spot (well, not necessarily the exact place in the photo above, but the general area!). Or it would be if we had a few million to spare. Unfortunately, real estate with a few acres here is outrageously priced (yes, we like it enough to have checked!).

With as taken as we are by the area, it’s no surprise we’re not the first ones to have felt this way. Ronald Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo was not far from here. He used it as his retreat during his presidency and it became known as the “Western White House.” Among the international dignitaries he hosted here were Queen Elizabeth II and Mikhail Gorbachev. And it turns out Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch was/is here too. There goes the neighborhood!

We’ve spent some time in the darling little Danish town of Solvang, which just celebrated its 100-year anniversary last year. Rob and I have both been here before, both separately and together, and it’s touristy but just such a delight. This meticulous, picturesque, pedestrian-friendly little village has flower-lined streets and windmills and is the closest thing to Denmark here in America.

I want to shrink our girls and put them in these traditional Danish clothes! How adorable would that be?

Ornamental storks appear on rooftops all over the town. The Danes consider them good luck (as do the Dutch…I wonder how many European cultures do?).

There’s a statue of Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish writer of just about every good fairy tale known to children…

…and a small museum dedicated to him and his 160+ fairy tales known the world over…

…which includes things like authentic correspondence from the man himself, who lived from 1805 to 1875.

In next-door Buellton, one can’t pass up a visit to Pea Soup Andersen’s, a stopover for travelers since 1924.

The rest of the food is nothing to write home about, but the signature split pea soup is delicious. Andersen’s serves over two million bowls of it annually.