Solvang

Hello good people, yesterday (Thursday) we farewelled Luke and Khristina as they flew off to New Orleans for a 5 day holiday. We just did some washing and basically relaxed, as you are meant to do on holidays. At 4pm, I had to drive Luke's work van back to office as the other employees would need it for transporting various organs and keyboards. This was an experience during peak hour - a 30 minute drive normally took nearly an hour!

View from back yard

Joshua met us there (he works there a few days a week) and drove us up to Solvang to see the new house he and Sam have bought. We stopped in Ventura for a meal at a Thai restaurant and took enough home with us for lunch the following day. We arrived at Solvang around 9pm, had a tour then hit the sack as we were very tired from all the driving.

Woke up this morning to some wonderful vistas - this is the view from the backyard with the mountains in the distance. The picture does not do the view justice, you'll have to come over here yourselves.

Gazebo

They also have this gazebo that overlooks the scenery and the paddocks at the bottom of their property. If you click on this picture to enlarge it, you can see the vase of flowers that was knocked over in the wind and shattered. I did not notice this whilst taking the picture, only discovered it later and managed to cut my finger picking up all the shards. Down below you can see numerous ground squirrels darting through the grass. Unlike their tree-dwelling cousins, they dig underground warrens and live there.

This is the view from the back of the house, our bedroom is the last set of windows on the

Rear of house

left. Floor to ceiling windows give us a grand vista to awaken to every morning. This morning we flung open the curtains to see the view only to confronted with fog obscuring just about everything. It lifted a few hours later to give us the view above.

I gave Josh a hand setting up his wireless network in the house which took us a few hours of patient work, but every part of the house now can access the wireless network.

"Shed" and Ros

Later we drove into Solvang to purchase some garden supplies for the house and Ros and Josh have been busy in the garden all afternoon.

The house has a shed (really a granny flat) that is built in the same style as the house. Josh is going to set it up as a workshop to work on some of Luke's keyboards so he can avoid commuting down to LA several times a week.

Kitchen

Here's a view of the kitchen. So far, Sam says, she's only used the stove to boil water.

Lounge room

And here's a view of the lounge room. Note the wood panelled ceiling and the face brick fire place.

Tonight Josh and Sam are taking us out for a meal at a local restaurant. Looking forward to that.