If only we had known what was coming in 2020, we might have made more voyage hay in the pandemic-free sunshine that was 2019. How many other frustrated travellers around the world must be thinking the same way?!
Now, nearly one third of the way through 2021, we have at long last broken free from self-imposed restrictions and have once again slept away from home. Admittedly, it was only two nights and a measly three-hour drive from our suburban life in beautiful downtown Belmont Shore, a small oasis of relatively sane living in the corner of Long Beach, the southernmost quarter of the Los Angeles megalopolis. But what a delightful way to express our new-found freedom.
Solvang, sometimes referred to as the Danish Capitol of North America, is the nearest thing to a quiet little European town to be found in these parts. Founded in 1911 by a small group of Danes, disenchanted by the Mid-Western winters chosen by their immigrant forefathers, and anxious to live the life their families had left behind in Denmark, the town was built from scratch on almost 9,000 acres (3,600 ha) purchased from the Rancho San Carlos de Jonata Mexican land grant. Initially the town’s architecture was strictly reminiscent of traditional styles found in their homeland, even using traditional materials wherever possible; modern artistic ingenuity with concrete has allowed the visual style to continue throughout the town centre although these days there isn’t so much solid brickwork and real timber used to produce the desired effect.
One can always find an excuse for a holiday and for this particular journey of discovery the guilty party was my 75th birthday. Celine had booked us into the Hotel Corque, a fairly large, comfortable, stylish, so-called “boutique” hotel close to the town center and well within walking distance of the multitude of restaurants, cafés and eateries that abound. Our room was on the second floor, overlooking the pool and with delightful views of the lush green hills that surround the town in nearly every direction; whether or not that verdant image survives the hot dry summers we will have to determine some other day. One of the joys, for me at least, of finding ourselves in surroundings that are reminiscent of so many of our travels is the promise of once again sampling café culture, good coffee and home baked patisseries, and Solvang delivers all of those in plenty.
The thought of fresh baked Danish pastries for breakfast, mid-morning snack time and afternoon revivers was irresistible; the only serious question was which of the many hostelries was most worthy of our attentions; the other consideration was how many such pauses in our short stay could our stomachs accommodate, without causing unwanted digestive trauma, let alone long-term bodily harm! A three-hour drive demands a reward for the participants and soon after our arrival, too early to check into our room, but armed with a map of The Village of Solvang thoughtfully provided by the hotel receptionist, we strode purposefully the fifty yards towards Copenhagen Drive where we found the promisingly named Danish Mill Bakery. In true Euro-café fashion, the pastries were temptingly displayed in long glass-fronted cabinets yet for some reason we decided to opt for the tastefully presented but rather uninteresting triple open sandwich platter, accompanied unfortunately by very weak filter coffee from a thermos flask due to the failure of their espresso machine. This was altogether an unfortunate mistake as this sixty-one-year-old establishment has good reviews, is comfortable and quaint and we even had a talking mannequin of an old moustachioed Danish pastry chef sitting next to us; I am sure their pastries are every bit as tasty as many to be found in Solvang, but our poor choice of comestibles did kill any inclination to return.
Our travellers’ hunger appeased, we were suitably fortified to continue on our tour of the town, or perhaps village is a more suitable epithet for this compact little community of around six thousand seemingly contented residents. There is a touch of Disneyland about Solvang that is perhaps inevitable in such close proximity to Hollywood, and yet it manages to avoid being tasteless. As well as the multitude of eateries, there are plenty of interesting shops to browse selling everything from recycled clothing to fine art, quite enough to make a slow stroll through the main streets a pleasurable pastime; but we still had a mission which would be satisfied appropriately at the far end of Mission Drive, in Olsen’s Bakery. Whilst the Danish Mill Bakery was, to be honest, a bit of a tourist trap, Olsen’s Bakery was the real McCoy. 
The baked goods looked and smelt totally enticing and before we had even tasted their wares we had placed an order for two loaves of Swedish Limpa bread and an aeblestrudel to be ready for our departure two days later; and after a few minutes drooling over the tempting array of pastries we opted to stop longer and share a Bear Claw and a “cream puff thing”, washed down with a couple of very welcome caffè lattes.
It was a beautiful day for a stroll around the town, warm sun ameliorated by a cooling breeze, and it being mid-week and out of season we took pleasure in the lack of crowds until finally the weariness that results from any long drive on California’s freeways took its toll and we decided to take an early night, determined to “do the town” properly the next day. Fortune was not completely on our side as we were caught out by the one and only fault issue we had with the hotel. Beautifully equipped with all “mod cons”, one little item, a very neat personal bedside light built into the lush headboard, decided it was definitely not going out of its way to embellish the hostelry’s image any further than necessary and to our great discomfort, several times during the night managed to turn itself on unaided by human intervention. The first time was before “lights out” and the bellhop who was sent up to resolve our problem reckoned a good hard thump would do the job, which it did for a while. One beef we both have with many hotel rooms these days is the plethora of little lights that serve no obvious purpose other than to annoy the light sleeper; the bed-side radio needs to remind us that it is always there at our beck and call; the TV not wishing to be forgotten in the middle of the night, winks its red light at us across the room; the fire detector proves it remains alive up there on the ceiling by flashing another light from about where the panhandle of Ursa Major should be located to those back sleepers amongst us; and inevitably management leaves a message of welcome on the internal phone, indicated by an otherwise insignificant little orange beacon that only becomes visible as one’s eyes become accustomed to the dark. Personally, unlike my dear bride, I am one of the lucky people who can usually manage to ignore all of these small nuisances, but even in my deepest sleep the sudden flashing on of a high intensity LED reading lamp focused directly onto my right eyelid – I am a left side sleeper – left me quite frazzled after two or three repeats.
Somewhat surprisingly we did actually sleep not too badly overall, the final flash to my eyeball serving as a seven o’clock alarm for me which I resolved, for a while, by cunningly smothering it with my luxuriously soft, well-puffed pillow. COVID restrictions meant no breakfast was being served in the hotel and after a leisurely long awakening, we eventually started our more detailed exploration of the town with a stop at another of the more highly recommended coffee shops, Mortensen’s Danish Bakery, where we sat out on the patio breaking our fast with an apple Danish, a custard puff and a couple of lattes as we observed the town’s clientele, not just a few of whom wore clothes of sufficient size to remind us to go easy on the pastries.
Suitably fortified by our morgenmad, we opted to check out the local galleries, the first of which, Stix’n’Stones, was filled with so many wonderful pieces of art as to seriously threaten our annual budget. But we were on a birthday treat and we were both equally enjoying browsing around this amazing collection of artisan craftsmanship, so when our visit ended it was no surprise that we needed to ask the young sales lady to look after our well-filled bag of goodies until our return to the hotel later in the day. And that was just the start. Two doors further along Copenhagen Drive, the Pavlov Art Gallery had some fascinating thought-provoking paintings by the eponymous young Macedonian artist, inspired by his studies of philosophy, as well as a series of beautiful landscape photographs printed on canvas, by his wife Iris. 
Still heading East, our attention was drawn to three wooden carvings of the Solvang Founding Fathers in the window of a building that started out life a century ago as the Santa Ynez Valley Bank. Renamed The Copenhagen House, this edifice is now home to The House of Amber, a large store that encompasses an impressive display of modern Danish design including everything from an enormous collection of Hoptimists, funny little spring-necked creatures of all colours, shapes and sizes that nod at you mesmerisingly, through to very smart Bering watches and the elegantly sculptured silverware of Georg Jensen; but the most interesting corner of the store is the little Museum of Amber, wherein one can discover the provenance of these beautiful natural gems that started out life millions of years ago as simple blobs of tree resin.
No old town or village is really complete without a good bookstore and the Hans Christian Anderson Museum performs that function admirably. Its main attraction may indeed be the well-informed life and history of that clog maker’s son who became such a renowned author of fairy tales and other stories; but it also houses its alter ego, The Book Loft, a veritable cornucopia of new, used and rare old books, in at least four different languages; I could have happily spent the rest of that day just browsing through the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of shelves on two or three different levels and breathing in the musty aroma of well-thumbed pages. 
It had been our intention to maintain some sort of gustatory deprivation for most of the day, as a celebratory dinner was on the early evening timetable; alas, hunger defeated those noble aims as we looked into the window of Solvang Restaurant and realized we had not yet tried the delights of aebleskiver. Variously described as odd-shaped pancakes, waffles and donut holes these oft-mentioned Danish snacks are in fact balls of dough mixture, slightly crispy on the outside and light and fluffy within after being cooked in a cast-iron skillet that resembles an egg-poacher, and traditionally served hot with raspberry, strawberry, black current or blackberry jam; what is more they are actually very, very tasty. But gourmands as we are when out on the loose, we realized our hunger was still lurking and decided to reinforce our midday snack with a slice of tasty, if perhaps a little too salty, fried medisterpølse, accompanied by a Hoppy Poppy IPA from Figueroa Mountain Brewing Co.
Weary from our happy meanderings we had one more necessary stop at the well-stocked Solvang Shoe Store, to buy me a pair of much needed sneakers and seek out some sandals for Celine; my needs were fairly quickly satisfied, but the ever-helpful manageress must have pulled out a couple of dozen boxes of shoes from her store in the back of the shop before we concluded the second objective simply wasn’t going to be achieved that day. Whilst having a good shoe shop is not exactly high on the tourist bucket list, its presence shows that Solvang is much more than just a tourist attraction, for there must be nothing worse than living in a town lacking the basic essentials
No birthday outing is properly fulfilled if it fails to include a special dinner and we were well pleased with our decision to place the responsibility for that exercise in the hands of the chef and staff of Mad & Vin, inside the Grandsby Hotel on Mission Drive. A ten-minute stroll from the Hotel Cirque in the cooling evening air, the Mad & Vin (which means “food and wine” in Danish) is a smart little dining establishment where the service is suitably discreet without being unfriendly, the atmosphere subdued without being depressing and where the food, if our choices were anything to go by, is tasty and well presented. Celine had a Flat Iron Steak which although slightly too pink upon its first arrival at the table, was seared to perfection a couple of minutes later, and my Cioppino was everything one could ask of the dish, a generous selection of fresh tasting local fish and shellfish swimming in a lightly spiced tomato and white wine sauce accompanied by fresh baked sourdough bread; lubricated by a couple of glasses of Stag’s Leap chardonnay, and topped up with generous portions of banana bread pudding and a flourless chocolate cake, this happy couple wended their contented way slowly back along the now quiet streets, contemplating the pleasant idea of perhaps one day living in such a welcoming community.
Next morning, after a night only “slightly” disturbed by the noise of a circulating “copper chopper” – only our second sighting of the “fuzz” in our 36 hours in the village – we awoke to another beautiful day, clean clear air, a coolish breeze and delightful views of green hills in all directions. Once checked out we went for a short drive around some of the nearby residential neighbourhoods before making a second stop at Olsen’s Bakery for our morning coffee and Danish, and not forgetting to collect the loaves of limpa bread and the strudel we had ordered so soon after our arrival in town. Then a bit more residential research out towards some of the rolling countryside surrounding Solvang and then, before hitting the road home, a final sortie into New Frontiers Natural Market Place to stock up our home larder with some of the freshest organic fruit and vegetables we have seen in California.
Friday afternoon is not the best part of the week to have to pass through downtown Los Angeles, and my mood had changed quite radically by the time we arrived back in Belmont Shore. However, we brought home some very good memories from our truly delightful birthday break in the almost European village of Solvang, with every intention of making a return visit before too long. Whether or not it will prove to be the end of the rainbow in our search for the future remains to be seen but it is certainly worth placing on the “distinctly possible” list. We just have to wait for today’s crazy seller’s housing market to settle down again to offer a more equable relationship between buyer and vendor.