California Trip - Day 8

June 27th - Monday "Meg and Solvang"

It took me a long time to get ready this a.m. We went to Meg and Hals'. Hal is on oxygen. We talked about his kids and relatives in Washington (near us). I rode with Meg to Solvang. We talked about survivalist topics and how the U.S. is headed for disaster.

We had a great time in Solvang. The first thing we did was eat Danish pastry. I had the "Black Forest". I found three knick-knacks that I wanted: An angel on a mirror ($70), a jeweled chamelon ($40) and an Indian doll ($125). I chose the first.


Megan got something (we don't know what). Miranda got some candles. Tim got a "dark side" T-shirt. We went back to the motel we liked in Santa Maria.

Meg and Hal took us to dinner at the Elks Lodge (one of the largest in the country, 4000 members). A big BBQ chicken dinner for $8.00. Megan had a lap band incident and Tim covered his face.

Maleen, Tyler and tribe arrived at the motel about 8:30 pm. They had a suite (looked like a conference room) right next to ours (they unlocked the door connected our rooms). Tim immediately began entertaining the three girls with blowing up gold balloons.

My comments:

I was really glad that we had a chance to stop by Meg & Hal's house. Poor Hal. I was reminded of when my mother was on oxygen. You could always find where she was in the house by following the oxygen tube. But it was great to see them again!


I was really glad that Meg was able to go to Solvang with us. It was a lot of fun going through the shops, and there are so many wonderful things to buy there. I was pleased that they even had a gluten-free marzipan cookie that I was able to buy at the bakery. Some of the things that they make are real works of art. I particularly liked the graduation cake that looked like a stack of books!

I thought Tim's T-shirt was great. It reads "Come to the dark side - we have cookies". It still makes me laugh to think of it. In one of the shops I came across a figurine that I had seen years ago and REALLY wanted, but it was just too expensive. In this shop it was on the 50% off shelf, and I couldn't resist. To me, it is the epitome of family.


Dinner at the Elks club was a lot of fun (if you discount my embarrassing lap band moment). One of the Elks who was doing the serving noticed how much Tim liked the rolls and kept bringing him more of them. Several people stopped by to say hello to Meg and Hal. They are obviously well known there.

Maleen and family turned up sooner than I expected. They were a bit stunned by the suite, which had a banquet table that could seat at least 12 around it. They had two regular beds and a hide-a-bed, which they had to pull out from the wall to get the connecting door open. After that, the kids (and us) were going in and out of that door every few minutes.

Tyler went off to do some laundry and ended up at one of the laundry places I had tried to use to dry my clothes the day before. I forgot about putting that in Sunday's blog. Remember that at the end of Saturday we had wet clothes all over our hotel room? Well, they weren't dry by morning. I went back to the laundromat where we had originally washed them, but there was absolutely no parking. So I went to another laundromat that I had noticed, and there was no parking there either (this is the one that Tyler used). I finally found a third laundromat (with lots of parking), and dried the clothes there. There was a little Mexican lady out in the parking lot frying sausages on a little grill and selling them to the all-Mexican crowd that were doing laundry. I stood inside next to my dryer, reading my Nook, and trying to ignore the TV set overhead that was blaring out Spanish. Quite an adventure.

We tried to get to bed at a somewhat decent hour as we were getting up early the next morning to go have breakfast with Meg and Hal. It sure was great to see Maleen, Tyler, June, Robyn and Ivory again!