Dear Diary, my name is
Dayle and this is what I did for my 47th birthday…
I’d originally wanted to go
to Catalina Island for my birthday,* because you get to go free on your
birthday. But my birthday actually fell on a Saturday this year, and I’d rather
go during the week, and, perhaps most importantly, my birthday again fell on
the same day as a nearby SCA event, King’s Hunt. So I decided Catalina could
wait.
The event was near Solvang, a pretty
little Danish village, so I thought it would be lovely to make a weekend of it.
We headed up Friday afternoon, stopping in Santa Barbara to have a random
dinner at a Thai restaurant, then continued on and checked in to the Solvang Gardens. Because they have
English gardens, and are eco-friendly, and all the rooms are a little
different. I didn’t get pics of our room, which was small but very pretty. We
booked late so we didn’t have a room overlooking the gardens, but that was
okay.
The next morning we had
breakfast at this little
hole-in-the-wall place in Buellton that had the best corned beef hash I
have ever tasted. When I told them that, they told me about how they marinate
the beef for three weeks, etc. Holy bejeesus, it was good. Once a month they do
locavore dinners, and I so want to go!
King’s Hunt and my birthday
have shared the day before, and last time, I brought cake. Cake, I learned, was
not the best plan, as it was a hot day and the fighters didn’t want sugar in
the middle of fighting, etc. Cake Fail. So this time, I thought it through, and
splurged on an enormous Edible Arrangement
of fruit on a stick. Success! I wandered around the event and walked up to
people (whether I knew them or not) and said “It’s my birthday! Have fruit!” I
ran out of fruit before I accosted everybody, sadly.
One friend had brought
champagne! for me, but she had only a little and Ken had only a little and
Morgana doesn’t drink, and about a third of the way into the bottle I realized
if I didn’t find someone else to share this, I was going to spend the rest of
the event snoozing on the dayshade floor, so I set off across the field to
where Albra was merchanting, because Albra has plied me with champagne on many
occasion. I lounged on the daybed in the back of her merchant booth and got
whapped in the head with the back wall because it was very very windy and we polished off that bottle, mmm yes we did!
We spent the rest of the
afternoon in our friends Rod and Collette’s pavilion, because, as I mentioned,
it was very very windy and the
dayshade was threatening to become the farmhouse from The Wizard of Oz, despite being staked down. After that, we bundled
Morgana and Brian into the car and drove back to Solvang, and went out to
dinner at a nice Italian restaurant. We drove them back to the event site and
then curled up in our room for a movie and snuggling.
Now, here’s the thing.
Solvang is smack in the middle of wine country. It’s surrounded by vineyards.
What I wanted to do on Sunday, however, just goes to show what type of person I
am.
Vineyards? Feh. Let’s go
visit us some miniature donkeys, baybee!
Okay, first we meandered
through Solvang in search of breakfast. Our intended destination was packed, so
we backtracked to a little place in
the center of town and ate in the courtyard. I had an omelette with lobster
and Havarti and avocado, OMG, and tried to take pictures of a little bird I was
feeding toast to.
We went back to the hotel
(by way of the Hans Christian Andersen Museum and at least one thrift shop as well as a hat shop because Ken needs
some kind of bowler but they didn’t have the right style) and lounged in the
gardens for a bit. The breeze was soft, the sky was blue, the trees whispered.
Mmmm.
And then we went in search of miniature donkeys.
I’d been tempted by the
ostrich farm, but I’ve been to an ostrich farm in South Africa and I was a
little tired so I had to triage my animal visitations that day. The miniature
donkey farm has a petting zoo of rescue animals (as well as miniature donkeys):
chicken, rabbits, a giant tortoise, goats, turkeys, etc.
(It was hard to get a good photo because the wee beastie kept moving around…)
And they had a zonkey. I
didn’t know until I read the brochure at the hotel that such a beast even
existed. It’s a cross between a zebra and a donkey. It was unimpressed by our
presence and attempts to take pictures. Did I mention its name is Zeeyore?
After that, we went to a
miniature horse farm, but it was hot and the miniature horses were even less
unimpressed by our presence than the zonkey was, and we weren’t allowed to pet
them. I did discover that miniature horses are frighteningly well endowed.
There. I said it. Move on.
We had a lovely drive home;
instead of sitting in traffic on the 101, we cut through Ojai (sadly, we
were too late for the Ojai Raptor Center’s Open House, although I’d already
resigned myself to that fact), and then stopped for Indian food in Ventura
before making our way home.
It was a perfectly lovely
way to spend my birthday weekend.
---
*If possible, I like to
have adventures on my birthday. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love the loot, but
the memories are what make things truly special. In the past, I’ve gone to the
LA Zoo, played with meerkats, hung out in a tiny bar to watch Styx’s drummer
play, stayed on the Queen Mary,
gotten a tattoo, held 80s flashback parties…
