Archive for Travel / lifestyle musings
December 25, 2007 at 11:48 pm · Filed under Home base, Travel / lifestyle musings
We tried living in our house for a day, and it was nice. We lived like ordinary people — if you overlook the near-total lack of furniture. We had a nice Christmas morning doing the sort of things that people usually do when they are celebrating Christmas. Since the house lacks a kitchen, we were forced back out to the Airstream for breakfast, but for the most part we stayed inside and sampled the suburban life: a few holiday phone calls to friends and family, reading books, snacking on Christmas treats, trying out the presents, and assembling those things that have “some assembly required”.
It felt nice, as a change of lifestyle, although I’m sure I don’t want to live like this all the time. Coincidentally, today I finished a book called “American Nomads” by Richard Grant, which attempts to describe and analyze the phenomenon of modern nomadism. The author alternately tells tales of nomads both historical and current, and his own restless story in which he is uncontrollably driven to wander the American southwest seeking the company of freight train riders, hitchhikers, hippies, “Mountain Man” re-enactors, and RV’ers. Although the book is a bit uneven, there are many gems of truth and I found myself wincing several times at the accuracy of Grant’s understanding of my personality.
It is undeniably the best analysis I have read on the subject of modern nomads. Most articles and books treat those who are compelled to explore as misfit exceptions, social oddities, and sideshows to mainstream American life. Only someone who has the bug himself can begin to understand the inner pressure that motivates us, and the author does a nice job of bridging nomadism and sedentary life so that each side can understand the other.
This is helpful to me. I have to admit that many times in this blog I have been a nomad snob. Forgive me — I’ve been so enthusiastic about this lifestyle that I’ve become like a reformed addict, trashing “sedentary” life at every opportunity. Without saying so directly, Grant seems to believe that it is in the genes and makes good points about the validity of each lifestyle, although I wish he hadn’t focused quite so much on the grittiest of travelers. Essentially he says, “to each their own.” I think he’s right. There’s nothing wrong with all you people who love your houses. It’s just that I am part of a minority of people who feel very differently. If it is wired into your genetic code and mine, that’s cool with me.
Apparently Grant lives here in Tucson, at least occasionally between trips. I’m sure we would get along if we met, although we’re nothing alike. He’s a hard-living Brit who thrives on rugged travel (sleeping in the car for weeks, walking the desert for days, riding freight trains with hobos), he smokes, he admits to a fair amount of drug use in the book, he seems at several points to be self-destructive and perhaps even toxic to others except in small doses. I’m far past any interest in living ruggedly except where it is necessary to accomplish a specific goal. I like traveling by Airstream with the occasional tent or hotel thrown in for fun; there’s no need in my lifestyle to sleep in a cold rolling boxcar with vagrants, not even “to get the story”, as Hunter Thompson would say.
Which brings me back to the house. We could have bought a condo (and seriously considered it) instead of a house. It would have been easier to maintain and there wouldn’t be this renovation task to complete. But at the time we bought, in the place we bought, there was better value in houses than condos. So now we have approximately 9 times the amount of space that we have in the Airstream, which means when we are stationary we can spread out. That extra space means comfort for all involved. It’s one thing to share 200 square feet when the world is your living room; it’s quite another to share 200 square feet when the days are short, the nights are cold, and there are fewer options of things to do outside.
Wendy enjoys a balmy evening outside our Airstream, near Destin, FL, Jan 6, 2006
That has been the one issue I’ve had with full-timing. The winters can be a bit boring. Really the only place in the continental USA where you can be guaranteed warm weather all winter is southern Florida and the Keys. In the rest of the south, and particularly the southwest, winter is characterized by changeable weather, warm days and temperatures plummeting to near-freezing at sunset. This makes for long evenings inside the trailer. Last winter we avoided much of the cold by staying in Florida in November and December, but this year we took an entirely different route.
Even a trailer as well-insulated as an Airstream is hard to keep warm on a 20 or 30-degree night. The trailer begins to feel like an old New England farmhouse with cold floors and drafts. People start to congregate around the furnace ducts, and the fuel bill shoots up. If it still feels like you’re in New England every night, and the nights are still 14 hours long, the enjoyment of being in the “sunny, warm southwest” is lessened. If I wanted to sit inside a confined space and surf the web, I could have stayed home.
So that’s what we’ll do. Parking here for a couple of months every winter seems like a good thing to me. We’ll get the pleasure of the southwest with the sheer comfort of a house. There’s better insulation, more room to stretch out on long evenings, better entertaining space … and while we are whittling away at winter we will be refurbishing and planning for the next bout of travel.
Do I sound like a suburbanite all of a sudden? I’m just trying to find that ideal balance to perfect our lifestyle. If we can’t be somewhere interesting in the Airstream, this house will be a good place to stay for a while. It certainly passed the test for Christmas Day. I wonder how long it will be before the genetic code starts demanding that I find out what’s around the corner, and we hitch up the Airstream to move out again.
December 20, 2007 at 4:55 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Today is our last day as full-timers …
Tomorrow we will pack up and tow, as we have so many times before, down the gray highway. But this time will be different. We’ll be going “home”.
It’s strange to think of it as home, since we’ve never really lived there. The house is really just a project for us. Since it will be in a state of renovation for some time, we’ll continue to live in the Airstream — in the driveway — while the work is being done. The one exception will be Christmas Eve, when we plan to set up on the living room floor for the night. (Hopefully Santa will not wake us when he arrives, since we’ll be sleeping right in front of the fireplace.)
Today has been unremarkable. I’ve been working and the kids have been playing. Eleanor has been organizing her stuff and talking to neighbors in the campground. This completely ordinary day has given me a little time to reflect on what has happened to us in the past two years of traveling.
One thing that is very apparent to me is the benefit Emma has gotten. Despite dire predictions by some, she is a full grade level ahead on most of her school skills, completely capable of interacting successfully with children and adults of all ages (so much for the “socialization” myth), and happy as can be.
I’m very grateful to all our friends along the way who pitched in to add to her education. For example, Bill taught Emma how to ride her bike without training wheels. Lou got her started on ink stamping and other craft-y things. Marie in Florida taught her to jump rope. Leigh taught her the cat’s cradle (and tried to teach her knitting). Tommy got her started on ukulele. Other unknown people we met taught her words of Spanish, how to identify various animals, how to behave in social situations, hula-dance, de-vein a shrimp, and a thousand other things. I am thankful for all those docents, park rangers, museum volunteers, retired teachers, and Airstream friends who added to Emma’s appreciation of the world. It may take a village to raise a child, but we’ve been blessed with an entire country of diverse people and that’s even better.
The next phase of the blog will be to document some of the adventures of our house renovation, but will not be stationary during that time. Two days after Christmas I have a trip to take, and two days after that we’ll be going to an Airstream rally. A week or so later I’ll be heading to Quartzite, and maybe Slab City. Other trips are also beginning to jell. Friends will be coming into town, and we’ll have the adventure of getting to know our new “home town”. We may even get to Mexico in February.
I think a step away from full-time travel to part-time will be good for us. It may make us renew our appreciation for the life we’ve had. I have to admit that we’ve become so accustomed to seeing new places that we may have lost some of that appreciation. I’ll be writing about the sensations of re-entry into a somewhat more conventional life over the next few weeks. And, during this time, we’ll have a chance to plot some entirely new adventures for late spring and summer 2008.
December 12, 2007 at 6:28 pm · Filed under Roadtrips, Travel / lifestyle musings
I have this strange feeling of turning a corner today. It started when I woke up and realized that I no longer had a sore throat, and the sensation of having been pummeled by a samurai in the recent past was gone. Eleanor and Emma are not fully recovered yet, but I think we are finally getting past that little souvenir of our Hawaiian vacation.
We also got the Airstream washed at long last. The poor thing was starting to look downright abused. There is a 24-hour truck wash near the Spotlight 29 Casino, and although we had to wait nearly an hour, the job was finally done and the aluminum sparkles again. I had forgotten how good the wheels can look when they are shiny. They were lost in a cloud of brake dust smudged with wheel bearing grease.
After the truck wash we pulled the Airstream into the local Albertson’s for grocery restocking. Although there are groceries to be had in Borrego Springs, our next stop, the shopping is better elsewhere.
We picked up the mail at the Post Office in Indio, one box of Business Reply Mail from magazine subscribers, and another box of miscellaneous mail. Despite my best efforts we still get paper mail from various organizations that I don’t care to hear from. I am considering going to a service like Earth Class Mail to eliminate most of the paper before it reaches me. They will scan the envelope and let me simply check off for each piece whether I want it forwarded, recycled, or opened (and the interior pages scanned).
By the way, our last mail pickup will be next week:
Rich Luhr
General Delivery
Borrego Springs, CA 92004
Anything sent to that address must arrive by 12/19. After that, we’ll no longer be full-timers. We’ll be part-time travelers (insert heavy sigh here). We have a few trips planned for January and February, but for the most part we will be parked in Arizona until mid-March. Then we’ll get on the road again for perhaps six months.
So the sensation of turning a corner probably stems from all these “last” activities. Last mail call, last big grocery re-stock, last few nights “¦ The knowledge that our travels are ending, even temporarily, has begun to hang in our subconscious and our daily choices. We bought less at the grocery store because we only need food for another week. We washed the trailer so it will be clean when we store it in the carport. We are picking up things that we would otherwise leave behind; we know they are destined to be unloaded in the house.
But I will not dwell on that prospect. We are in one of our most favorite spots in the world and we have eight days to enjoy it. It was a beautiful drive along the western side of the Salton Sea from Palm Springs to Salton City, with the long blue sea and the reddish mountains framing it.
Once at Salton City, we turned west onto S-22, which leads to Borrego Springs, and I commented to Eleanor that from here on in we’d probably see a lot of great boondocking sites. Just seconds after I said that, we spotted a nice open area with a scattering of picnic shelters and absolutely not a soul around. [Edit: This was a few miles east of the Arroyo Salado Primitive Campground, somewhere in the state OHV area.] We turned off the pavement onto the hard packed desert floor and bumped our way over to the site you see in the photo. It’s the kind of spot that I live for: secluded, quiet, scenic, and still a bit wild. There are no roads, only a few tracks left by ATVs and trucks. We’ll spend a night here and then move to Borrego Springs for a week.
December 7, 2007 at 10:01 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Some of the most interesting people we meet are fellow bloggers as well as fellow travelers. Brian and Leigh are a great example. Although they aren’t on the road presently, they did nearly two years in a 1963 Airstream Flying Cloud, working the whole time, just like us. Although we never crossed paths while they were traveling, the commonalities of our experiences are amazing. We’ve had the same challenges, the same questions, the same answers.
This evening we were hanging around the kitchen with mugs of tea after dinner, and inevitably the talk turned to things that happened in the trailer. We’ve both had the spice rack explode onto the floor while towing, and the concerned friends who advised us against doing what we were doing. We’ve both faced the challenges of living with others in a small space, and survived that acid test of a relationship.
Photo by Emma
But still I am surprised by the little things. At one point, Leigh pointed to her black socks and Brian’s black socks. When they went out on the road for the first time, they bought 28 pair of identical black socks so that laundry would be easier. No worries about whose were whose, or which pairs matched up. Her size 6 feet and his size 8 were close enough for shared socks. That’s a great idea that never occurred to us.
For the past three days I’ve been working in Brian and Leigh’s office with them. All three of us are very busy at our tasks, and yet it was no big deal to share an office. Being roommates, and negotiating space, and working with others comes very naturally to someone who has lived in an RV for a couple of years. It was almost instinct. We got a lot of work done and yet still had time for a 2 p.m. “poker break” yesterday. (By the way, we haven’t been playing for money, just chips.)
This experience reminds me how ironic it is that so many companies that are phobic about their employees working outside of the office, even when it saves money for the company. Many of us have proven that working at home or even on the road not only works, but it can increase productivity and satisfaction. It is even possible that living the RV lifestyle helps people learn good self-motivation, time management, and organizational skills. Yet so many people still feel that all of their employees need to be sitting in a cubicle in an office building … even when they have no real need to be there.
As this attitude changes, there will be more opportunities for people to work and travel at the same time. That means more opportunities to exchange ideas, think creatively, and find new talent. That’s how I use my working days on the road, and it has paid off many times over. “Black socks” are just a tiny example of the dozens of great ideas I’ve picked up along the way.
Airstream Life magazine would never be nearly as good if I was not out here in the world, meeting new people and hearing their ideas. Although we are a “virtual company” (meaning we have no office space or permanent physical location), it is still critical to regularly interact with people on a one-to-one basis. This binds relationships, promotes brainstorming, gives me new perspectives, and brings me in physical contact with the lifestyle. After my laptop computer, the Airstream is the most critical business tool I have. The collection of “black sock” ideas I have implemented in the business during the past two years is the proof.
November 28, 2007 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
It’s raining today. No snorkeling. We are taking the opportunity to catch up on some business and personal phone calls. Yes, even in Hawaii on vacation, we keep up with things. And since I’ve got some time, I’m going to share a couple of rants with you.
Item #1: WIFE SWAPPING. While checking email, I got the following forwarded to me by an Airstream friend. I’ll let the message speak for itself…
Hello,
My name is [omitted]. I’m a Casting Producer for ABC’s Primetime show, “Wife Swap.” I hope you don’t mind me contacting you, but we’re gearing up for a fourth season at the moment and we’re currently looking for one-of-a-kind families with plenty of personality! Specifically, we’re looking for the ultimate family of travelers”¦a family that lives and travels the country on wheels! Please feel free to forward this email on to anyone you think would be interested in taking part in this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
In case you are unfamiliar with the show, the premise of Wife Swap is to take two different families and have the moms switch places to experience how another family lives. Half of the week, mom lives the life of the family she is staying with. Then she introduces a “rule change” where she implements rules and activities that her family has. It’s a positive experience for people to not only learn but teach about other families and other ways of life. Wife Swap airs on Disney owned ABC television on Mondays at 8 pm- the family hour!
Requirements: Each family must consist of two parents and at least one child between 7 and 17 and should reside in the continental U.S. (There may be other children living in the home who are older or younger than the required age”¦as long as one child is in the required age range.)
Participating in the show is a very unique experience that can be life changing for everyone. In addition, each family that tapes an episode of Wife Swap receives $20,000 as compensation for their time. Anyone who refers a family that appears on our program receives $1000 as a ‘thank you’ from us.
Riiiiight.
First off, let me say we have absolutely no intention of even considering such a thing. Despite the promises, the reality shows I’ve seen have been universally demeaning and about as educational as the Jerry Springer slug-fests. “Wife Swap” is not for us.
I’m amazed that people participate in reality TV shows, but they do. In fact, people clamor to be on them. Every time I see someone being humiliated on reality TV, I think, “Hmmm, self-esteem problem.” Why else would they do that to themselves?
But hey, if this fits your bill and you want to sell your family for $20k, send me a private message using our contact form and I’ll forward you to the guy who sent me the email. He’ll be happy to collect the $1,000 referral fee.
ITEM #2: PATRIOT ACT. I understand the premise of the Patriot Act. It was intended to give the Federal government more information about us, with the intent of making it harder for terrorists to cover their tracks while operating in this country. What it is really doing is making ordinary people into liars.(1) (2)
The Act requires banks and other institutions to collect and verify a “physical address” when people do ordinary things like apply for credit cards or open a checking account. If you live in an RV and don’t have a house, what do you do?
Simple. You lie. Set up an account with a Private Mailbox firm, or join Escapees and become a legal resident of Livingston TX, or fudge a fake utility bill with Photoshop. There are all kinds of easy ways around this one, and some of them are legal.
If everyday people can figure this out, can’t the terrorists too? Of course they can. We can expect that even members of Congress will realize this eventually, and if politically possible, the noose of requirements will tighten.
Already it is becoming a problem for law-abiding folks like me. Today I got a call from a large national bank that is processing an application for us. The nice customer service lady wanted to get a physical address, so I gave her our Arizona address.
She was able to do something startling: she looked up the public record for the address instantly, and told me that unfortunately the record for our house still showed the prior owner’s name. Thus, for purposes of the Feds, the address of the house we have owned for seven months isn’t good enough. In other words, we are in compliance but still are hassled because of data errors beyond our control. This illustrates how easily the combination of technology and law can work against innocent people more effectively — and in far greater numbers — than it works against malicious people.
So I gave her my parent’s address in Vermont. She noted that the first name didn’t match, and we were denied again. Then I gave her the address of some property we sold this summer in Vermont. Of course the public records in Vermont have been updated, so now the current owner’s name is shown and so we struck out again.
Finally I dug up a utility bill from the new house and faxed it over to the bank. This satisfied the requirement. But what if I hadn’t owned a house, as was the case last year? We’d be forced to work up a lie.
The requirements of the Patriot Act forces large numbers of otherwise law-abiding people to find creative ways to duck the intent of the law. And doubt the real bad guys have fewer qualms about it. If it is that easy to evade, what good is it doing?
There’s no doubt that advancing technology and “mission creep” will make it harder in the future for those who don’t fit the Federal government’s preconceptions of how we should live, or whose reality doesn’t match what the database says. Full-time RV’ers are among the first to get caught in this sticky web, but I predict it will get worse if the Patriot Act is allowed to stand.
November 24, 2007 at 11:55 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
This morning I looked out the balcony of our hotel room and saw a billowing line of smoke moving south along the coastline. Malibu is on fire and the smoke extends past LAX. This made me think of our Airstream, which is parked up in the hills north of Los Angeles. Will a wildfire consume the park while we are gone? I can’t imagine anything worse than coming back from our trip to find it a melted puddle of aluminum. It’s still our primary home at this point.
Well, there is nothing I can do about it right now. This morning we could only stare at the news video on the TVs while eating the breakfast buffet at the hotel. With grim images of glowing houses in our heads, we went to the airport.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I have no love for commercial airplane travel anymore. I used to travel a lot via air, for business purposes, but now I am happy to have a job that requires me to travel via the surface of the Earth most of the time. Still, once or twice a year I find myself riding the air bus, either for a family visit or for an overseas destination, and it reminds me of the long string of hassles and annoyances that come with air travel these days.
The overwhelming feeling I get from air travel today is crowdedness. You have to abandon any sense of personal space from the moment you arrive at the airport. This is particularly upsetting to the RV’er I think because we are accustomed to privacy on demand, and a huge amount of freedom in our travels.
The process at the airport seems designed to strip away your individuality and any pretensions you might have that your life is under your control. Start with a line, a long one to check in bags, with unpredictable delays and malfunctioning “self check” machines. Then wait in another line to present your checked bags for scanning, then another line to have your identification compared to your ticket. By the time you reach the final line to be stripped of your shoes, have your pockets emptied, and present your personal toiletries in a see-through bag, you’ve come to accept the system. Fast “institutionalization.”
So the subsequent wait to shuffle down a line and wrassle for overhead storage bins doesn’t jar you as much as it might have an hour earlier, when you were still free and living outside the institution. I’m amazed that people who don’t travel by RV but who do travel by air tend to ask us how we bear up “crowded together” in the Airstream. I’d rather spend a rainy day in my Airstream with my family than five hours on a Boeing 767-300 ER “¦
“¦ which is where I am at this writing. The “ER” designator means “Extended Range”, and it’s the version that is favored by long-haul carriers for overseas flights. Two big jet engines and an extra-long fuselage means Hawaiian Airlines can cart a whole herd of tourists over the Pacific in complete safety and moderate comfort, albeit with only a few cubic inches of personal space.
Not that I have anything against the Boeing. It’s a remarkable piece of technology and my immense respect for what it represents as an achievement helps temper my feelings about riding inside it. Just seeing the smooth fuselage gives me an awestruck feeling. I can’t help think about where it has been. Yesterday perhaps one of the jets might have been in Paris, this morning parked at Dallas, and in ten hours it might go back to Europe. The one we are huddled inside at the moment is hurtling at about 500 MPH back to home base, Honolulu. So now you know where we will be for a while.
From observing the other passengers on the plane, I see two common responses to the lack of space in a jet airliner. Most people withdraw like a turtle and try not to notice the outside world, even when the guy who bought four gin bottles from the flight attendant is now lurching around inches from their lunch.
Sitting in seat 44G and trying to read a book I have a wide range of body parts thrust into my little space, including a variety of buttocks, the occasional hip, and a pair of orange-striped breasts. I really could have lived without any of those intimate presentations. My sandal-clad foot, when it wanders an inch over the little dividing line that separates my space from the aisle, has narrowly avoiding being stepped on several times. Like other people in the “turtle” category, I have been pretending those things didn’t happen.
The other major response is to redefine the boundaries of the aircraft and simply take over as much space as one wants. This is akin to sharing a bed and hogging the blankets; it works great for the hogger and not so great for the bedmate. We are surrounded by “hogs” here in the cheap seats, and frankly they are having a better time. They lean over the aisle to shout boisterously to their new friends. They grab the backs of seats as they walk with total oblivion, and laugh loudly to each other. They stand in the aisles until the flight attendants ask them for the third time to please sit down. Their personal space is pretty much all of Rows 43 through 45, plus the aisle between G and H, plus the back kitchen when the crew is not serving meals. The turtles around them are cowering.
On a long flight, the airplane forms a sort of community, much like living in an apartment building. There’s the hog couple in 43J/H: she talks so loudly that I pity her neighbors, he’s constantly befuddled but eager to let his traveling companions use his Hawaiian Airlines VISA card for their drinks and movie rentals because he gets points. Together they are a sideshow that is occasionally worth watching.
The turtle family in 41 is just trying to survive the trip with two small children, one of whom periodically shouts something unintelligible to all of the coach section. The baby behind us in 45G starts to cry sympathetically when the baby in 41 does, so we get stereo crying every 20-30 minutes. When the movie ended, the airline began playing scorchingly loud Hawaiian music over the public speakers which didn’t improve anyone’s mood and woke up all the babies.
This flying experience will end, as they all do, with the screech of tires on the runway, everyone standing up to await the jetway, and a huge sense of relief that it’s all over. I see the same look on the faces of people coming off the jetway as I see on people leaving the dentist. At least until they get to the baggage claim and the car rental counter “¦
Still, at the end of the day there is a nice reward. We’re in Hawaii now, and it is beautiful as always, and ahead of us lies a promising range of possibilities. The plane ride will be worth it in the long run. We have no worries except for the slim prospect of our Airstream being burned in a wildfire while we are gone, but I’ll try to concentrate on the snorkeling instead.
November 16, 2007 at 8:51 pm · Filed under Tips & Ideas, Travel / lifestyle musings
We seem to be really scoring with the kids these days. Two years ago when we were roaming California for the first time (in December), we went through a long spell of seeing hardly families, and we were wondering if this was going to be the pattern during the school year.
This year the situation has been much better. First we met up with 8-year-old Allison at Halloween, then again in Yellowstone. Here in Los Olivos we are lucky to find 7-year-old Madison, and this weekend we’ll see another 7-year-old down in Ventura. Emma has been having a great time, and luckily we’ve enjoyed the company of all the parents as well.
Last night we backed the Airstream into the driveway of our hosts Dennis and Cindy just before sunset. I’ve got to be constantly aware of the short days now, because if we had arrived just 30 minutes later the moderately tricky backing job past trees and around corners would have been escalated to a bona fide “ordeal”. Even in this part of southern California sunset is arriving before 5 p.m., which makes our driving days very short.
Last night Cindy made a great dinner for us all, and so tonight Eleanor is going to reciprocate with an Indian meal. I complain that the Airstream’s cabinets contain too many ingredients and not enough food, and for non-cook like myself that is true. But on nights like this the value becomes clear. Eleanor is able to whip up an amazing ethnic dinner (Indian, Japanese, etc) right out of the masses of diverse ingredients in the cabinets. Since I love foreign food of all types, I can only sit back and admire as she creates something worthy of a genuine Indian restaurant in the space of an Airstream kitchen. Even outdoors in a 20-foot radius around the trailer you can smell the wonderful odors of rogan josh, curry, dal makhani, and palek paneer.
Los Olivos is in horse country, and it seems that nearly every house in the rural areas (which is most of it) has a horse paddock or a small farm growing nuts or berries. Just a short distance from our parking spot is a tiny downtown, which is filled with art galleries and wine tasting rooms. It’s nice, pedestrian-friendly, and pleasantly uncrowded — at least this time of year. I went there today to mail a few boxes of books back to Tucson for storage (we’re trying to lighten the trailer and make some room).
A tip for those of you who are on the road for long periods: look for the Priority Mail “Flat-Rate” boxes at the post office when shipping heavy items like books. You can stuff as much as you want in those boxes regardless of weight (for about $9) but you have to be sure to get the box that says “Flat Rate” on it. We divested ourselves of about 20 lbs of stuff, but more importantly freed up some valuable storage space.
The other neat town near here is Solvang, a “Danish village” according to the billboards. The entire town is themed with Danish and psuedo-Danish architecture, much like Frankenmuth MI but quite a bit larger. Even the Mexican restaurant is clad in a Danish exterior. The overall effect is quaint to a fault, to the point that it begins to resemble EPCOT at DisneyWorld.
The stores are mostly one of these categories: wine shops, gift shops, restaurants, bakeries and inns, so it gets a little redundant after a while. Fortunately, Solvang has managed to keep out the homogenization of chain retail shops, and except for an IZOD Outlet most of the stores seem to be local and unique. That makes it much more interesting. If the outlets take over, Solvang will look like Freeport, Maine in drag.
The bakeries and restaurants are my favorite part of Solvang, only because I like to eat anything that doesn’t move quickly. We decided to be totally decadent today and have a pastry lunch at “Mortensen’s Danish Bakery”, and is our practice we all ordered something different: a butter cream-and-raspberry-filled puff pastry for Emma, a raspberry Danish for me, and some sort of almond cake with mocha butter cream for Eleanor. We haven’t been so bad about lunch in a year, when we did the same thing at a little French pastry shop in St Augustine FL. It’s good to be bad once in a while.
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