Wilson & Dana's

Our trip ended in many ways like it began:  with a quick tour of Los Angeles on our way to the airport in a bus.  The weather was overcast with temperatures in the 60’s. 

Note about LAX, the airport:  do people in Los Angeles not pee?  Bathrooms were few and far between!

There was much concern in the airport about baggage.  There is a strict 50-pound weight limit with expensive fines for heavier bags.  There were scales outside and near the entrances to test your suitcases, and many of the people in our group had bags heavier than fifty pounds.  There was even a designated “Repacking Area!”  We managed to slide in just under fifty pounds, while toting home 6 pairs of shoes, 9 glass jars, 2 wine glasses, 2 beer glasses, and four bottles of wine!  I’m just a talented packer. 

After checking our luggage, we hit the line for the security check and x-ray of our carry-ons.  I’m all for security – the more the better – I want them to catch the baddies before they get on my plane!  So while x-raying my bag, I just happily waited.  Then she backed up the conveyor to look at my bag again.  And called for a manager. 

They both looked at the x-ray of my bag, moving it back and forth, as my mind reeled.  What could I have put in there that is a no-no?  My drink?  No, I threw it away before getting in line.  Nail clippers?  No, I made sure to put them in the checked bag.  What in the world?

“Ma’am, do you have a pocket knife in your bag?”

I just glared at Wilson, who was too far away to hear what they’d asked me.  I decided to kill him on the spot, with his own knife, if he put it in my bag.

“I don’t think so – let’s ask my husband.”

By then, he understood the question and insisted he put it in the checked suitcase.  They went through my entire bag, pulling out every item and examining them carefully.  They separated the contents of my one tote into three of the plastic bins and didn’t see a knife.  So they ran them back through the x-ray machine s-l-o-w-l-y. 

Each time they’d back up the conveyor, they’d knock Wilson’s bin off the end of it, so he was looking more and more frustrated – and somewhat guilty.  I knew *I* hadn’t done anything wrong – I don’t even own a pocket knife! – and I decided that if they found one I’d throw Wilson under the bus and blame it all on him.  I’d even cry. I was going home!

By this time, everyone else in our group had gone except for the unfortunate couple stuck behind Wilson. 

They finally concluded that I didn’t have a pocket knife, that they don’t know what looked so suspicious in the first place, and that I wasn’t going to try to take down the plane – just my own husband.  They re-packed my bag (with my kettle corn on the bottom, thanks a lot) and sent us on our way. 

The flight itself was uneventful, with Wilson and I yet again sitting across the aisle from each other. 

When we got back to New Orleans, I was grateful to once again be in the land of Many Bathrooms.  Our luggage arrived in perfect condition, without wine leaking from a broken bottle.  In fact, everything remained intact!  Ha! 

We stepped outside, though, and almost died on the spot from the oppressive heat and corresponding humidity.  Ninety-five degrees!  A good thirty-degree difference from Los Angeles that morning. 

But the best was yet to come.

We took the shuttle back to the hotel where our car was parked, to find this:

I almost wrote Day 3!  This trip is flying by!

This morning was our last time in Buelton.  After some group meetings, we left there for the Reagan Library late in the morning. 

The Reagan Library was, well, undescribable.  The amount of history in that one museum is almost overwhelming. 

There was an exhibit on the Magna Carta, basically the original blueprint of human rights and freedom.  It is almost 800 years old and one of only four copies in the world.  Unfortunately, no photographs were allowed in the entire Magna Carta display.  It will be going back to England next week, so we were very lucky to have the chance to see it now.

My favorite part of the entire museum were the love letters written from President Reagan to his wife Nancy.  They were so loving, so thoughtful, so obviously written by a man completely smitten by his own wife.  At one point, I was nearly in tears from the beauty of their relationship.  In the gift shop, I bought the book I Love You, Ronnie – a collection of their love letters. 

One large part of the museum is Air Force One.  There is an entire airplane inside!  Again, no photographs were allowed inside, but they took our picture waving from the door like the President and First Lady.  I can’t scan that one until we get home, so you’ll just have to wait. 

After the Reagan Library, we headed into Santa Monica.  Oh, that LA traffic!  I’m not sure if I could live in a place with that kind of traffic!  It made me very glad that I wasn’t driving and made me miss the empty country roads of home.

Once in Santa Monica, we found that our hotel is right across the street from the Santa Monica Pier, right across from the Pacific Ocean.  And the sun came out for the first time since we’ve been here!  And it got warm!  (Like in the 80’s, maybe.)

This is the view from our hotel room window:

It was another wonderful day here in not-so-sunny California.  Since we’ve been here, the clouds have moved out of the way exactly one time.  The sky looks ready to open up and pour any minute now, but it has looked like that most of the week without a drop of rain.  Must be maddenly frustrating for the local farmers, who have only gotten eight inches of rain in the past year.  (To put that in perspective, we generally get around 60 inches per year.)

We started off the day with the sweetest strawberry I have ever eaten.  I am the queen of putting sugar on my strawberries to make them sweet enough, but this fresh-from-the-field jewel didn’t need any.  And they were huge:  at least 3/4 the size of my palm!

Our next stop was Teixeira Farms, a family vegetable farm being run by the fifth generation in a row.  We began that tour with a sit-down meeting on the problems, challenges, and special aspects of this farm.  It was very interesting to me to see that farmers all the way over here are facing many of the same problems as farmers at home.  The big exception, of course, is that they face a lack of water where we sometimes face an over-abundance.  Grass is always greener on the other side of the country, I guess.

Teixeira Farms was a gigantic operation and I was very impressed with the efficiency of their daily activities.  They have one employee that just packs ball bearings, and another that just changes tires.  But there were two things that really stood out to me:  the cleanliness of everything and their spare-parts room.  It looks like a hardware store!

Can you imagine walking out into a field full of fresh vegetables and looking at this view?

Mr. Teixeira then brought us out to where his employees were cutting and packaging celery.  I never even thought about how celery grew, or that it is packaged right there in the field by the same people who are cutting it. 

After the spinach scare a few years ago, the California Leafy Green people (I can’t remember the last word in their organization) has really cracked down on sanitation and food safety.  While this creates more headache for the farmers, it helps to ensure a safer food product for the consumer.  Some of these rules involve people in the fields.  We had to remove any jewelry not covered by clothing and wear hair nets while in the field.  

After the vegetable farm, we had a Santa Maria Style Bar-B-Que, which is unlike any BBQ I’ve ever attended.  The food was excellent, large pieces of meat seasoned with their Santa Maria secret seasoning blend, then sliced so you could pick out your prefered level of doneness.  The cole slaw was made with fresh broccoli – a major crop here – and there was a salad made with fresh iceburg lettuce from local fields.  The wine was local, of course, made from grapes grown in the vineyard where we ate. 

But the star was the avocado.  They were halved, with the pit removed, and then stuffed with crab salad and a cherry tomato.  These were so good that I ate two!  (Six months ago, I didn’t eat avocados – thought they were green and gross.  Thank goodness I decided to give them a try!)  I cannot believe that I didn’t get a picture of them, but this is a recipe I’m sure to try at home.

Our next stop was in fields of flowers.  They smelled so wonderfully, before we were even off the bus! 

These are Sweet Peas (the flower, not the food), and are actually going to be cut down and harvested for their seeds.  The flowers are just grown to make the seeds!

There was also a field of this flower, a Dianthus.   They are being grown to be cut and sent to florists.

Next were the Column Stock flowers, also being cut for florists.  There were fields and fields of these beauties.

The next field over was artichokes.  Again, I never thought about how artichokes grew, I guess I thought they grew on the ground like pineapples.  Nope!

We had dinner at A.J. Spurs restaurant.  Wednesday nights is Live Music Night and there were two guys on stage.  One had a fiddle and could play the heck out of it.  The other had a guitar and sang.  The first song they played was Louisiana Saturday Night and followed it with Jambalaya, Crawfish Pie, File Gumbo.  They didn’t know we were there from Louisiana, but they made me feel right at home!

We leave this area tomorrow and head to Santa Monica for our last night in California.  We will be visiting the Regan Presidential Library and Museum.

Today was one loooong day!  Whew!

We started out with a delicious breakfast here at the hotel in Buelton.  Of course, we ate too much, again. 

Then we got back on the bus and travelled southeast to Goleta.  We visited an avocado and lemon orchard.  If you had asked me yesterday how they grow avocados, I would have thought on bushes or something. I just never imagined they grew on these huge beautiful trees.  The shade under the trees, along with the breeze from the ocean, set a beautiful stage.  We are apparently in the wrong business – the “farmer” here can open his front door and see the Pacific.  A beachfront farm!  Whodathunkit? 

Avocado Trees all around 

These huge palm trees in the distance make those giant avocado trees look tiny! 

They used the coolest tool to cut the avocados from the tops of the tall trees.  It’s somewhat like a rope-operated trimmer but with a bag attached.  If I could find one to buy, it’d make a great Fathers Day gift for my father-in-law to use on his Satsuma trees.  Shhh!  Don’t tell him!

Some of the men were even using these way up on ladders! I wish I had gotten a full-length shot of these, but all I got were close-ups.

Yes, he is backwards on the ladder. Can you imagine their Workman’s Comp insurance premium? 

These tools were so neat to Wilson that he asked if he could try it!

He was so good at it they offered him a job!

These are the lemon trees.  Look at the beautiful backdrop – imagine, gorgeous mountains on one side and the ocean on the other. What a life!

This is a close-up of the bottom of a lemon tree.  The white paint around the trunk contains copper to keep the snails from climbing up.  Those lumps below the white are snails!

Those big ugly snails remind me of a Landon joke: 

What do you call a Snail on a Ship?

A Snailer!

Who this fat woman taking a picture with my husband?

Our next stop was Carpinteria for a cut-flower nursery.  Hundreds (thousands?) of acres of greenhouses full of beautiful flowers.  I took pictures, but they don’t really convey the vastness of this one room.  It’s 30 acres of Gerber Daisies in every color imaginable, in color combinations beyond my imagination.

Then we drove into Santa Barbara for a few hours of free time.  We were down by the wharf and there wasn’t as much to do there as I had figured there would be.

We did get a closer – and this time STILL – view of the ocean.  Until this point, every picture I had taken of the ocean was blurry from flying past on a bus with a driver who doesn’t waste time getting anywhere.

There were three empty dingies (for lack of a better description) tied to the ladder under the wharf.

Upon closer inspection, we found that they weren’t empty after-all!

We decided that we want a camper like this one.

Yes, that is a van on top of a bus. Classy, no? 

We needed a close-up.

2 futons, a surf board, and a dog. What more do you need in life? 

Interesting fact about California wildlife:  their squirrels don’t have bushy tails!

Think it’s the humidity that makes ours bushy? 

I don’t know what I expected of the ocean, or the beach, or California in general, but I do believe it was entirely based on television stereotypes – and that very little of it was correct. 

For instance, this beach was no Baywatch.

There were no lifeguards, let alone Pam Anderson in a red bathing suit!

Because we are the epitome of “country come to town” we did something we had only seen homeless people do here:  we laid in the grass and took a little siesta.  The grass is softer here than at home because the lack of rain and heat mean they don’t have to cut it so often so it doesn’t have those hard edges from frequent trims.  It was like a thick carpet!  I’m sure we looked quite the sight, but it was very relaxing.

We did take off our shoes for an up close and personal experience with the ocean.  After all, this was the first time either of us has seen the Pacific Ocean.

Yes, 2 days in California and Wilson is wearing Man-pris! 

Wilson: “Shit, that’s cold!” 

Me: “Take the damn picture!” 

We finished our day up with a superb dinner at the Firestone Walker Brewing Company in Buelton, walking distance from the hotel.  This micro-brewery is still owned by the Firestone family, the only public business they still own after selling the vineyard and winery.  The name might sound more familiar if I said “Andrew Firestone, of The Bachelor fame.”  Our waitress told us that his wife just gave birth to a precious baby boy.  Does that count as celebrity gossip or did everyone already know that?

So that was the end of Day 2 of our California Trip.  Tomorrow’s itenery includes a strawberry farm, a seedling farm, a Santa Maria Bar-B-Que, and another cut-flower nursery.  See you there!