Santa Barbara - Part 3

Wine Tasting Day and C's birthday!

32....what an old man! Just kidding.  I'm right behind him :) I let him decide what he wanted to do on his birthday and he choose to make it our wine tasting day.

After a lovely breakfast at Denny's and a leisure time getting ready, we headed up the mountain to the San Ynez Valley.  This area had TONS if winerys!  No it's Napa, but its close.

He drives like this sometimes because his arm gets numb.  I can't wait until he can get rid of that darn cast!

 

On our way.  The was not the safest picture haha.

 

First we stopped in the awesome little town called Solvang.  It is a little Dutch town. Seriously, all of the buildings were so cute!

 

In C's football games they always do this thing on the scoreboard screens about watching his "fro grow" if the crowd cheers really loud.  This mirror made both of our fro's grow!

 

C was feeding the soldier his snow cone...

 

We were walking by a little clock shop and looking at all of the cool cuckoo clocks (yes, I just googled that spelling).   I was just curious how much something like that would cost so we went it. I immediately spotted an adorable Dr. Seuss clock and  told C that I thought that was be such a cute theme for a nursery some day. He looked at me and said, "Should we get it?"  Of course I turned to mush and agreed.  We now have not one, but two Dr. Seuss clocks for our future babies nursery. I am going to have to start collecting. I never did find out how much a cuckoo clock costs!

 

After exploring Solvang for a while we headed to our first winery, Rusack. We got to try 7 different wines and keep an nice wine glass for $9 each.  The landscape was gorgeous and we sat on this grassy lawn with a bunch of snacks (brie cheese, bread, dry salami and our fruits from the fruit stand). Just beautiful.

 

I have never been wine tasting, so I wasn't sure of the protocol. Do you sit there and sip your tasters for awhile or do you zip through them and move on? C was kind of sipping and enjoying, so I went with that. We spent an hour at the first winery.  I suppose that is a sufficient amount of time.  I would have rather spent less time and visited more places, but oh well. It was still fun.

 

 

We found a "C sized" bottle of wine at our second stop, the Sunstone winery.

 

We didn't buy any wine at the second stop, but this place had the most amazing balsamic vinegars and flavored olive oils to try.  We came home with a chocolate vinegarette, so tasty!

 

After that we stopped at one more place in town called Presidio. It was more like a bar that you could do wine tasting at, but it was open later than the rest so we had to stop in!

 

I wish we would have started earlier.  I thought we were going to go to several more places, but they all closed at 4 or 5pm.  Bummer.  Now I know for next time!

 

Have you ever been wine tasting?