The Days of Wine and Mimi - Part 1

A fine wine is enhanced and perfected by patient waiting.  An orange on the tree will not be as sweet if plucked on first sight, but only after days or weeks of persistent solar nurturing.  The finer old German baking recipes all warn you not to use honey less than a year old, but insist only on that harvested at least a season ago.  Age refines; patience sweetens; delayed gratification intensifies and concentrates the final pleasures.  And so, being over a month in the long-ago, I finally get around to posting Christmas tales and pictures.  It was not procrastination that crippled me; sloth has no foothold with me.  It was a deep-seated desire for the photos to mellow and ripen and for the otherwise bland and insipid stories to ferment into tales much more worthy the telling.  Or so I'm saying.

Christmas is, of course, a time of a thousand wonders, but if you happen to be the beneficiary of a thousand and one wonders, and that final wonder is having Mimi and Grampy visit all the way from Maine, then the previous thousand wonders all fade quickly into the background.  Little stirs the hearts and minds of our family than a Christmas visit from Mimi and Grampy.  There's just something about stocky folks from far northern latitudes that resonates so well with the season.

Mimi and Grampy arrived a little less than a week before Christmas, and the lone disappointment of their advent was that their flight arrived far too late for the über-enthusiastic welcoming committee that would otherwise have honored the event.  All the better for the weary travellers, I'm sure, but there certainly were some bitter children who were expected to go to bed and actually fall asleep on the cusp of so monumental occasion.

Mimi and Grampy got a day or two to relax, but they were soon after put to work being festive.  One excursion took us up the road a half-hour so so north of Santa Barbara to the small Danish-themed village of Solvang.  It's one of those touristy replica towns, but the schmaltz is palatable enough when you throw in all the cool bakeries and Christmas decorations.  We stopped at a family favorite restaurant on the way up and introduced Mimi and Grampy to Buellton's famed "Pea Soup Andersen's."

A couple of cumulative gallons of pea soup later we re-crossed the freeway into Solvang and began to eat our way through the pastry shops.

Grampy is not much on wandering around wasting a lot of dough on a bunch of knick-knack shops, but he is very much into wandering around a casino and wisely investing a lot of dough on craps and poker tables. Fortunately, for his sanity, and subsequently our own, there just happened to be an Indian casino two or three miles down the road. I temporarily bequeathed Stacy and Mimi with the kids and drove Dad down to the resort, dropping him off, happy as a clam, then back up the road to rejoin the rest of the group in town. We perused the shops and took pictures in front of the famed red shoe of Solvang. We admired faux-Danish architecture, and, of course, paused for a fresh bakery break.  (Mmmmm.  Abelskivers!)

There are only so many shops you can browse and so many Danish Danishes you can consume before you're tired and cranky. That time arrived earlier than our planned rendezvous with Grampy. Mimi, while not the casino hound that Grampy is, has been known to pull a penny slot machine or two, so we planned to drop Mimi off at the casino to find Grampy and keep him company, while Stacy and the kids and I took a drive around the area. The plan was flawlessly executed. Mimi was soon settled into the land of a thousand flashing lights and then we hit the road just as the sun was drifting low in the west.

We headed for Lake Cachuma, 10 miles or so to the south east. There was a cool dam and lookout park we'd been to before and we thought we'd try to find it and give the kids a wide open space to release some energy. As we came upon the lake I took what I thought was the turn-off I'd remembered, but I was mistaken. No problem - the road lead to a wonderful campground on the shore of the lake and the girl at the gate was happy to let us in and have a look around. It was a really nice spot and we tucked the info away for a future retreat.

We found a spot near the shore and the kids got out and immediately set about joyfully. A couple of minutes later their squeals of delight alerted us to a discovery. There, beckoning from the bowels of the earth, was a humongous monster cave. OK, maybe more like a gopher hole, but it was exciting none the less. The intrepid explorers insisted on having their pictures taken up close and personal with their their amazing discovery, a request I was pleased to oblige. Though Mommy voiced no objection, she did shift from one leg to the other the whole time in clear anxiety, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt she was silently imagining a frothingly rapid animal of inexplicable size and ferocity erupting from the hole to drag her children away, or at least to nip them on the nose.

We were, fortuantely, spared any such animalistic assaults.

As the sun set and the temperature dropped, our alloted meet-up time approached, so we loaded back into the van and swung by the casino to pick up a waiting Mimi and Grampy. The fact that we skipped the steak restaurant I'd been planning on and drove through Burger King on our way home should provide some indication of the level of financial gain the afternoon in the casino afforded us.