Cold rain, curvy roads, æbleskiver and sausages in Solvang
We should back up.
It was time. Time to hit the road. Time to go riding. Time to go exploring. The Bay Area is bouncing between beautiful days and cold, foggy days. We went searching for warmth and fish tacos. Part 1 got us to Ensenada. This is how we got there.
We never really go anywhere to get there. The getting there is the thing. We've been eyeing Highway 1 since the state finally fixed the landslide and reopened the coastal route. We picked the least direct, slowest, curviest route possible. Leaving in the cold morning with warm southerly visions in our heads. By the time we hit Monterey, it was raining. We'd picked summer gear, figuring we'd tough out a little chill rather than be overheated in Southern California and Mexico. We were cold the whole way down.
Highway 1 down the coast. Big Sur. Should be a UNESCO heritage site. Not sure why they built an awesome road into cliffs that Mother Nature does not want built there and keeps trying to destroy.
A few one-lane sections where you wait for a parade of cars to pass before the light changes. One spot where a pilot car travels down with you. We happily filtered to the front, waited our turn, and were greeted with an open road. Lots of dashed passing lanes are still here while the rest of the country seems to be making them disappear. The freeways were thick with CHP on some kind of maximum enforcement, but Highway 1 was cop free.
Somewhere near San Luis Obispo, you leave the coast, and the road turns inland, the ocean disappearing behind you. We'd been cold for two hundred miles, and then we weren't.
Nobody warns you about the ostriches. Coming over the pass from the 101 the Santa Ynez Valley opens up wide around horse farms and farmworkers tending the fields, and there they are, a half dozen of them running around in a field below the road at a place called Ostrichland USA, like it's completely normal, because apparently here, it is. And then suddenly you're in Denmark. Full Denmark. Windmills. Thatched rooflines. A bust of Hans Christian Andersen looking placid and slightly smug, the whole thing so committed, so aggressively Scandinavian against a backdrop of California oak and chaparral that you have to sit with it a minute before you can decide whether you love it or it's insane. The answer, eventually, is both.
This is Solvang, a town of 6,000 souls that Danish immigrants conjured out of the raw Santa Ynez Valley in 1911 and have been doubling down on ever since. The streets are crowded with slow-moving tourists on a late weekday afternoon, the demographic trending decidedly older, but intermingled are young families from far-off places handing us their phones to photograph them in front of windmills, popping in and out of bakeries with buckets of butter cookies.
The town's bells ring at times nobody can explain. It's 23 minutes after five. Clang Clang Clang. Seven minutes to eight in the morning. Clang Clang Clang.
It was that in-between time, too late for lunch and too early for dinner, and we hadn't eaten since morning. Eat now? Eat later? Eat now, have to eat later too? Scroll. Scroll. Scroll, and we ended up at the Copenhagen Sausage Garden, mostly because we got a chuckle out of the goofy name.
Hard to decide. One sausage? Two? Which two? The sampler settled it. Bratwurst, Kielbasa, and the Jalapeño Cheddar Bacon are the top three. A Danish Red Lager. We found a table.
There are Trump hats at a few of the picnic tables, which lands a little sideways in a valley that still has a certain reverence for the old way of doing this. Reagan had a ranch up in these mountains, rode horses, cleared brush, ran the country from up there long enough that they called it the Western White House. A couple nearby, both hatted, are loudly working through some legal situation we can't quite follow and don't entirely want to. Somewhere up in these same hills, the Chumash Casino sits on tribal land that was here long before any of this. Nobody's making a scene except the couple making a scene.
The tube steaks arrive on a board, lying on a checkered red-and-white paper, already soaking up the grease. You dress the meat sticks from the condiment island thick with every imaginable squeeze bottle of house-made mustards and condiments, grainy mustards, jalapeno mayo, ranch, curry, and BBQ sauce. We ease into the bundle with the Bratwurst first, on a hoagie bun dressed with dijon mustard and relish.
The Bratwurst is applewood-smoked, dense with garlic and spice, that snaps when you bite it. The Kielbasa goes deeper, a rich Polish gut-punch of paprika and red pepper, hearty and unapologetic. We knife and fork the Polish sausage, dipping it in grainy mustard between sips of beer. That is where the meal should have ended.
Then there's the Jalapeño Cheddar Bacon. A warm hit of heat and greasy cheddar with bacon flavor woven through the whole thing. It's good, but really too much. But the spiciness feels out of place in the land of Danes and we file that observation away without resolving it.
We wander off in the direction of the hotel.
We go to sleep early.
BREAKFAST
Most days, we're on the road at daybreak, chasing sunrise and sparse traffic. This day, we'd planned a later start to dodge morning Los Angeles commute traffic on the way to Mexico. We made our way down empty Solvang streets to the Solvang Restaurant, home of Arne's Famous Æbleskiver.
Inside, people are already deep into breakfast. A whole table of Santa Barbara County Sheriff's deputies are ordering hearty breakfasts. Regulars arriving, greeting officers with neck hugs. It felt like something from another time, when that was just a normal thing that happened at breakfast. We watched it all from our booth, interested observers, letting it happen. The place knows itself.
We didn't even try to pronounce æbleskiver, but our server knew what we wanted. They come three to an order, little round pancake balls, dusted in powdered sugar, raspberry jam, and they don't look like enough to fuel a day's riding. You eat one anyway. Round and golden, soft and custardy inside, warm, like a Yorkshire pudding that figured something out. Then the second. Then the third. You drink your coffee and linger longer than you planned.
We'd be in Mexico by afternoon.
Soren Hemmila
We came back through on the way home, carving the San Marcos Pass past Lake Cachuma, and stopped at Olsen's Danish Village Bakery. A Danish sample and a box of cookies for the family. Sometimes that's reason enough to go a different way home.
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