A Long Weekend to the Central Coast…

Due to some hotel confusion during our Disneyland trip, we had a hotel night we needed to use up in Solvang before the end of summer, so we took advantage with a little road trip down into the Central Coast Wine Country a couple of weekends ago. We were only gone for three nights, but it was perfectly relaxing and wonderful!

On the way down Tom was kind enough to stop and get out my camera (which I’d loaded into the trunk for safekeeping when we stopped for lunch, but then forgot to retrieve when we hopped back in the car), and then he even washed the windows so I could get clearer shots of the gorgeous skies as we drove!

We spent our first night in San Luis Obispo. We wandered around downtown a bit (and I played with my Lensbaby—and admittedly haven’t improved much, but if determination is a factor, I WILL CONQUER IT!), and then we had a fantastic dinner on a patio above the river at Novo. It was SO yummy!

The next morning we drove further inland and spent most of the day dragging our poor, ever-patient girl from winery to winery. The weather was glorious, and the wine wonderful, as always.

We ended up in Solvang that night, where we had another fabulous dinner at a place recommended to us by a winemaker, called Root 246. It was delicious, and FUN because you got to sit on these fabulous white leather couches to eat on your own little coffee table. And the food was amazing! (But we have also come to the conclusion that dining with Emily is less affordable than it has been in the past as her palate has sophisticated a bit so that she is no longer satisfied with chicken strips from the kids’ menu…)

The hotel we stayed at reminded Emily of the Shining (which she’ll be glad to tell you her father terrified her with a few days prior while he was channel surfing), so I felt the need to creep her out a bit more by taking a scary photo of it—if only I could write REDRUM on the walls in Photoshop… ;-P)

After shopping in Solvang, we headed out to our final stop of Santa Barbara, with time for one more winery along the way.

This isn’t composed terribly beautifully, but still I love how adoringly he’s looking at our baby:

For our last day, we just played on the beach in Santa Barbara and did some shopping along State Street before heading back up north to home. It was a quick trip, but utterly perfect!