I made my annual drive back to my mom’s for the holidays. This year, my mom told me about Solvang, and a couple of months before December, we made plans for a 2-day visit before Christmas. After she told me about the town, I looked it up and all the google map photos made it look very appropriate for a photo trip. I took my X-E1 with the 27mm lens with me, and tested out a new travel backpack for the trip.
I normally do the driving, but for this trip, my mom offered to drive us. This gave me a rare opportunity to enjoy the view and photograph what I saw1. The day started out pretty foggy, and the drive from my hometown to Solvang covered a lot of small towns and desolate plains.
We passed a lot of oil wells on the way. I don’t know how to describe it properly, but there was a certain level of beauty in all of it, despite the overall appearance, or perhaps precisely because of it. Sort of like the Grapes of Wrath2. It’s not what you normally think of when people say “California,” but lots of communities like this line the pockets of larger cities.
There were long stretches of empty, single lane highway road between low hills and mountains. I didn’t want to risk my battery so early in the trip, so I didn’t go wild with road photos (but went wild on photos in the return drive)3.
We checked into our hotel and then drove over to Solvang. On the way, I wanted to stop by the Ostrich farm I saw on google maps. Once we got there, I quickly realized how popular it was, which did not bode well for Solvang’s traffic either.
The most notable part was the smell lol—I’m not used to going to farms. The ostriches were so big, it was the first time I’d seen them up close in person. By this point, it was pretty sunny out, and lots of family with kids were here also enjoying the novelty.
I didn’t want to risk getting too close for a better shot, so most of my photos didn’t capture anything too interesting. My favorite part was seeing the emus. I’ve barely seen them pictured, and my interest was mainly due to the Great Emu War, but seeing them in person was a bit of a shock. The blurred picture above was an emu that had popped over for a glance at the commotion. I didn’t get a good picture of it, but their “feathers” looked more like greasy, long fur.
We stayed just for about 15-20 mins, and then drove over to Solvang. As soon as we arrived, my biggest fear was realized: parking. After circling for a while, we ended up parking a few blocks away from the center of town in one of the neighborhoods. I swapped seats with my mom to help her parallel park in a tiny space we finally found.
For this trip, I took a travel backpack for luggage (I might review it in another post; I kind of want to talk about it), and used my sling for walking around town. Since I couldn’t fit everything in my sling if I included my camera, for this trip I tried to just have the camera around my neck the entire time, instead of storing it in the sling when I wasn’t taking photos. It took a while to get used to, and I didn’t like how the camera would bounce on my body while I walked, but it was definitely the right decision for carrying it while staying light.
The town itself was beautiful and quite a bit kitschy, but absolutely packed. What neither my mom nor I realized when we booked this trip was how perfectly scenic it was for Christmas, and how popular of a tourist destination it would be at this time of year. A lot of my photos had a distracting amount of cars parked in the shot, so if you notice photos with too much sky, it’s because I had to tilt up to crop the cars out as much as possible.
We walked all around until we got to the iconic windmill, and I snapped a few shots of what I could with all the people around. My mom insisted on taking photos4 of me, but none of those photos turned out well, lol except one where I’m making a ridiculous face that will not see the light of day.
I wanted to check out the historic mission before we rested for the day, while there was still light out. The Santa Ines mission was too near closing for me to bother with a proper paid visit, so I just looked around the exterior and browsed the gift shop.
My mom hurried me out of there because she wanted to repark our car nearer to the city before we grabbed diner. I just took one nice shot of the mission area that wasn’t a tight hall or tilted vertical shot. This one is probably the only photo I really liked of the area.
We walked back to our car and tried to find a nearer spot for dinner. It took ages of me circling around before I finally snagged a spot. The whole ordeal was horrendous, and absolutely why I hate driving to any busy locations.
By the time we tried to grab dinner though, the restaurant we wanted to eat dinner (Bit o’ Denmark5 pictured earlier) was too full and didn’t even have room for the waitlist, so we walked around until we found the only place with any availability. They told us it was a 20 min wait, but in the end it was probably closer to 40 mins.
These are photos from my phone. The first was from a bakery we visited earlier in the day, and the second and third are of our meal for dinner at Red Viking Restaurant. I got the combination sausage and meatball, and my mom took a risk with the pickled herring. I worried she wouldn’t like it, but she said she would be fine.
One bite and she was not lol, so I gave her some of mine and I ate all the herring. I’m pretty sure I’ve had it from IKEA, when I bought a jar of the “Sill Senap” the last time I was there.
Finally, it was time to drive back to our hotel and rest for the night. I went to bed super early since there was nothing else to do. Overall, it was a mixed bag. My mom wasn’t the ideal traveling partner, and it was hard for her to just wander around. She wanted everything to be a perfect photo op, and I was just more interested in other things. She nitpicked me a lot, which in turn made me a bit irritable.
I enjoy her company in general, but I don’t think it works well when she’s put in a stressful situation, which will commonly happen during travel. It was easier when I was young because I just followed whatever she wanted. We’ve had vague plans for a trip to Europe for years, but I’m really not sure if I can go through with it.
I’ll continue with day 2 in Part II of this recap.
Footnotes
- It was a bit of an adventure taking photographs in a moving vehicle. Sometimes my mom would slow or speed up right as I’m about to hit the shutter. This either ruined the shot or gave me a unexpected but pleasant surprise. ↩︎
- This area is pretty near the setting of the novel, actually. ↩︎
- I’ll cover this better in the next entry, for Part II. ↩︎
- My mom always wants me to take photos of people, but I just want to take photos of places. She always wants to photograph me, but takes horrible photos every time. All of the shots came out blurry, but at least she didn’t accidentally video record instead. That happened a lot whenever she tried to use the ZV-E10, no matter how many times I warned her not to touch the record button. On day 2 of the trip, she told me she was serious about photographing me, so I tried to teach her to use the camera again, and a few shots turned out well, with the focus at least. ↩︎
- Had we known how busy it was, we would’ve made an reservation earlier in the day, but alas… lessons learned. ↩︎
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