Our last stop yesterday was to Solvang, CA which I’ll let Wikipedia explain: “Solvang was founded in 1911 on 11,000 acres (4,500 ha) of the Rancho San Carlos de Jonata Mexican land grant, by a group of Danish educators, who traveled west to escape midwestern winters. The city is home to some bakeries, restaurants, and merchants offering a taste of Denmark in California. The architecture of many of the buildings follows traditional Danish style. There is a copy of the famous Little Mermaid statue from Copenhagen, as well as one featuring the bust of famed Danish fable writer Hans Christian Andersen. A replica of the Copenhagen observatory Rundetårn in the scale 1:3 was finished in 1991 and can be seen in the city centre.”

Jeremy Feeding Ostrichs from Jeremy Person on Vimeo.

OstrichLand was probably my second favorite stop yesterday, mostly because I love animals so it was fun getting so close to the ostriches.  They are som big, powerful and dare I say even ugly creatures!

Here are some interesting facts I learned from my visit:

• Adult ostriches stand 8′ to 9′ tall and weight 250 to 350 pounds
• Ostriches mature at 2 to 3 years, and breed until 40 years
• An ostrich can reach speeds of 45 MPH
• The oldest ostrich on record is 81 years old
• The ostrich is the only bird with two toes
• An ostrich egg weighs 3 to 4 pounds, the equivalent of 24 chicken eggs.  Ostrich eggs hatch in 42 days
• A good hen lays 40 to 60 eggs a season.  One layed 120 eggs!  Ostrich farming started in Southern Africa in 1857
• Ostriches are vegetarians and eat 3.5 pounds of food a day
• Each ostrich produces 1.5 pounds of feathers per season
• Ostrich hens incubate the eggs during the day, the rooster sits on the eggs at night
• An ostrich chick grows one foot taller each month
• The ostrich is native to Africa
• Ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand.

Christina and I hit the road over the last few days to visit her grandparents in Southern CA.  We left on Saturday morning a few minutes after 5am and traded off sleeping and driving.  I didn’t get to bed until 11pm Friday night because I was up cleaning the house from a long week.  I’m always glad I cleaned the house prior to traveling because there is nothing more stressful than coming home tired from a trip than returning to a disorganized home.  Not to mention I had someone checking in on Wilbur so I wanted to give the impression I have my life half together.  I made a big pot of coffee which Christina and I took with us on the road.  About 30 minutes down I-5 I was a talking fool, the caffeine hit me and I don’t remember what the conversation consisted of but it was tired caffeinated banter from me I’m sure.  I loaded up my iPhone with a bunch of podcasts which came in handy after the caffeine and my bantering slowed down.   I’ll post the interesting podcasts later with some comments, but I was happily playing talk show DJ for a few hours.  At some point she fell asleep which gave me a chance to listen to Pandora for a while.

I think our first stop was a gas station and then McDonalds for a gourmet breakfast of Egg McMuffins.  The McDonalds we stoppped at was really busy for some reason and in 20 minutes or less we were back on the road.  If my groggy memory serves me right Christina took over driving and I took a nap for an hour.  I can usually get by on very little sleep but anything under 6 hours and I’m a zombie.  I woke up when Christina was going over the grapevine and we listened to more podcasts until we hit LA.  We talked with Christina’s sister, brother in law and saw played with their baby for a few minutes before getting in their car to drive another two and a half hours to Palm Desert which is outside of Palm Springs.  Holy moly Palm Desert is hot and dry but I guess that is why the word desert is in its name.

We got back to the LA area around 9pm so Christina and I went to a nice mexican restaurant.  Somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 I found my hotel which is a few feet from where trains go through town.  Luckily only one train went by which was before I went to sleep.  We had planned on going down to San Diego Sunday morning to see friends but I think we were overly optomistic and decided it would be too much in one day.  Therefore we decided to head back to the Bay Area and hit as many destinations headed north as we could.  The first stop we made was completely unplanned which was the Ronald Regan National Library (they need a new web designer).  Of all places we visited yesterday I think the Regan Library was my favorite.  The above pictures and video are from our visit.