Yesterday, other than me trying my hand at some cooking, we did nothing. It was pretty dull for the casual observer.
Today, however, we traveled into the territory east of Santa Ynez and CA-154. We turned off 154 at Armour Ranch Road and headed east into some beautiful country at the foot of the San Rafael Mountains. We didn’t expect to see a lot of wildlife because there are scads of Republicans and Rotarians and their enormous, pricey estates here but we were fooled. We saw, before leaving the campground, western bluebirds, titmice, acorn woodpeckers, Oregon black-eyed juncos and the usual doves, crows and blackbirds. Once outside the campground and on our way through Happy Valley, we saw about a dozen and a half mule deer, big murders of crows, entire cities of ground squirrels, a large tarantula, many flashy magpies, a northern harrier, wild turkeys, and some white-tailed kites hovering over their by now digested prey.
After a loop up Armour Ranch Road into Happy Valley, we returned to some back roads, Foxen and Refugio, near Buellton, and found more wildlife but it was more exotic in nature. There were some enormous cattle with great long horns but Holstein black-and-white, ostriches, bison, long-eared donkeys and a zebra. Strange livestock they have around here.
On the way back home to Rancho Oso, we pulled over in the allegedly Danish community of Solvang, famous for its cute northern European architecture and myriad shops catering to rich tourists. We have been in Solvang before and, since Peggy was at the wheel during this portion of today’s drive, she pulled right in next to a very tempting and dangerous bakery called Mortenson’s, where we spent more than we should have on pastries we absolutely should not have. The Danes believe that anything in pastry that is not chocolate or buttercream should be sugar. I am positive the stuff we took away is bad, and possibly deadly for us but we ate some anyway. It was great.
See pix. Click here