Of used bookstores, the Red Hat Society and Ostriches

Solvang is also called "Little Denmark" and that it is, complete with windmills and every store selling little wooden clogs that say "Solvang" on it. Which, because I'm sucker for dust collectors, I now have a mini one sitting on my desk.

The main purpose of going to this little town is shopping. That's all there really is. Oh, that and Ostrich Land, but I'll talk more about that at the end. Firstly they have at least two good used bookstores. The first one we went to I got The Complete Sherlock Holmes, copyrighted 1931.And it wasn't too expensive either! The other used bookstore, that one is worth the trip down there. A unique thing about most of the stores is that they'd be multilayer, a small store on level, some stairs and more of the store there. Sometimes going up to three stories, neither story being much larger than a fast food restaurant. This second used book store had on the first floor a little coffee shop (with bumper stickers all over the place that said "Friends don't let Friends drink Starbucks") and new books, then you went up this windy staircase to what looked like an attic to where the used books were and another small set of stairs to even more used books to an even more atticlike portion of the store. And then you left the "attic" and entered a more modern looking room which was the Hans Christian Anderson Museum, which is suppose to have the largest collection of HCA books of anywhere. We spent more time in this store than any other. And all of us got a copy of Anderson's Fairy Tales, complete with a little sticker on the back saying its from the museum.

The rest of the stores were split into food places and antiquish places that sold uber expensive stuff. Everything there seemed to be split between mind boggling expensive (example: $40 for a sleeveless t-shirt, and thats on sale) to very cheap ($2 for nice earrings). Most of the clothing's stores we looked, but only in passing because none of us was going to spend $140 for a skirt. And then there was the Red Hat Society merchandise. Someone must have told the people who have their stores there that this is the ultimate place for ladies over 50 to shop because there was everything, from actual red hats to pins to travel bags, everything!

The Christmas shop. Year round this store sells exclusively Christmas ornaments and stuff. All at painfully high prices, but it was pretty to look at. They had some of the prettiest ornaments made out of sea shells tastefully covered in glitter. I think this store rubbed off on some of the others cause there was quite a few stores that had Christmas stuff out.

The time went by quickly, with both mom and I have bags full of books (Mom really liked her Mensa puzzle book...she's convinced the answer key is wrong on one of them, actually I think she's right) and all sorts of quirky things.

Ok. Ostrich Land. While we were driving down there there were two things I noticed and wanted to check out on our way back, one was this seafood place off the freeway that just seemed to be sitting off on a pier in the middle of nowhere (which we never could find again) and the second was the Ostriches. We drove by and theres this huge stretch of land and at least a couple hundred ostriches! I wonder if anyone's ever crashed trying to look over and figure out what these animals are, seeing llamas isn't so weird, but ostriches!? So on the way back we stopped at the place, which was closed but we got to see the big birds and take pictures of them. I laughed at the insanity of it all and seeing those birds was definitely a highlight.

Copyright © Joelle Wright 2003-Present