Some photos from my long holiday weekend.
My boyfriend’s lovely family came to stay with us for the weekend. We ate out for Thanksgiving dinner at a VERY nice restaurant downtown, and everything was delicious. Dinner was outside so we got to watch the sun set out on the ocean. I didn’t bring my camera because I thought it would be pretty tacky to be taking pictures every five seconds…
The next day we traveled up the highway to the village of Solvang. According to the literature we got at the visitors’ center it was founded in the early twentieth century by a group of Danish immigrants who wanted to build a community around a school. Now it’s pretty much a shop-filled tourist trap (in my opinion) but it does have some pretty buildings; I suppose if I had spent more time there than I did I may have a much different opinion.
We had a simple, but pretty tasty, Danish lunch at a restaurant called the Greenhouse, which was actually a real greenhouse. The highlight of the trip (at least for me), though, was Mortensen’s Bakery which is just next door. We popped in and were stunned by the amazing selection of authentic (well, I guess they were authentic!) Danish pastries! Crispy bearclaws, cherry danishes, all sorts of creations. I would definitely make a trip all the way to Solvang just to get more pastries. YUM!
We drove around and explored the local countryside for the rest of the afternoon. The grown-ups were looking for some good places to taste local wines, but we didn’t have very much luck. I had never been to a winery before (at least not that I can remember) and I would have loved to run up and down the long lines of vines (that rhymes!) and taste the little grapes (which probably wouldn’t have tasted very good to me!) and take macro photos of the plants and cool stuff, but I didn’t think I was allowed to do that so I just stood back aways and soaked it in as a whole.
I love the design of wine bottles. Always so elegant and photogenic.
As you can see, we were at the Sanford Winery. Unfortunately, my camera batteries were nearly dead and I didn’t bring any spares (and I knew that the non-NiMH/Lithium batteries that my boyfriend picked up at the drug store wouldn’t last more than a few minutes in my behemoth of a point-and-shoot) so I didn’t want to overdo it with the pictures for fear of missing a perfect opportunity.
Which leads me to the problem of taking photographs while on vacation, or out on the town with friends. When I take pictures, I take zillions and zillions of pictures – multiple angles of the same shot, up close, far away, different kinds of light and shadows, etc. I have a tendency to stand in one spot for five, ten, fifteen minutes at a time trying to get a good image, which really can slow down a walking tour and annoy other members of the party who want to move on to something other than the berry bush that I suddenly have a bizarre attraction to. This is one of the reasons that I have been taking a lot fewer photographs of late. It’s not as much fun to go out by yourself, but you also can’t get as many pictures as you would if you went out by yourself. Hmm…
Anyway, it was a very wonderful weekend, and I’m so excited to only have two weeks left of classes before winter vacation! I’m hoping for lots of snow-inspired art this winter. Wish me luck!
Some interesting quotes and tidbits I found today during my surfing:
“Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one’s horse as he is leaping.” – August Hare
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” – Jack Kerouac
As I noted yesterday, November will be over very, very soon. Wishing you all will have wonderful weeks ahead of you in December.
(P.S. Isn’t it funny how fluidly writing comes when one is procrastinating?)
Written by Fuzzy | View Comments
