Day 6: Room with a view, (not!)

I'm Our room is small and gloomy and not much fun to,stay in, so we spent most of the day out and about. We both went for an early run before breakfast, the beach front area was full of joggers and power walkers at 7:00, but I suppose this is California after all!

After breakfast we went to collect our hire car, the Hertz agent for the area is based at the Sea front Hilton, a truly massive and extremely stylish hotel, it occurred to me as we were hanging around the Foyer that we could easily blag another breakfast...

It's tough, but someone has to do it!

After collecting the car we headed for the hills east of Santa Barbara, because we'd been told there were wineries and vineyards aplenty, and so there were, and we found ourselves glasses in hand at a small family run business near Ballard called "Lincroft". Our "tasting" session involved sampling 5 different wines, we were taught the etiquette of "nosing" the wine - as in; it's considered rude to put your nose in your wine, and lots of apparently educated phrases to use whilst drinking - as in; "a hint of tangerine zest and citrus on the palate", and, "flavours rich and layered, full of tart cherry and forest floor", Aldi's bottle of the week will never be the same.

After the winery we came across a really weird small town, Solvang. This place is known as the "Danish capital of America", and it truly is a "Disneyfied" version of a small Danish town 100 years ago. Obviously founded by Danish immigrants in the 1880's, the place now is full of pastry shops, windmills and arty clothes outlets, (I didn't see any Lego or crime writers though).

A Danish bakery in Solvang

Hans Christian Anderson statue to continue the Danish theme.

Back in SB, (as we locals call the place), we explored downtown and discovered it was "farmer's market" day, really atmospheric and a great opportunity to people watch. 

Several years ago in New York I bought a cap from a shop called "Goorin Brothers" , it was a real favourite and I was upset to carelessly  lose it whilst on a pub crawl in London last year. Anyway, we came across the west coast Goorin shop, and without much persuasion I bought a replacement, but I'm under orders not to wear this one when out drinking.

The Goorin hat!

A walk along the beach, wetting our toes in the ocean was a nice end to the day, we came across a mini nature reserve, and Jan's ornithological skills were tested once more: "these birds are bloody medium sized"...