Six towns are considered part of the Santa Ynez Valley and we have visited each one over the past 3 days. The closest one to Lake Cachuma, the recreation area where we are camped, is Santa Ynez. Even though we have visited this area before we had never stopped here. It is a quaint town with one main street crowded with boutiques, breweries, wine tasting rooms and several small restaurants and a couple of B&B’s. Next is Ballard, a very small community with a great big canyon surrounding it full of vineyards. Solvang and Buellton are good sized cities with a Dutch heritage and archetecture. We arrived in Solvang on Wednesday in time for their farmers market! I love markets like this! Buellton is more the fastfood and lodging town for the valley. Los Olivos is almost all wine tasting shops with a few diners, art and gift shops sprinkled among them. And last is Los Alamos which is two blocks of tasting rooms, an antique store and a couple of lunch cafes.
Today was cloudy, rainy, cold and dreary so we drove to Lompoc which is outside of the Santa Ynez Valley and in the Santa Rita Valley. After lunch we found a cluster of wine tasting rooms with wines from this valley. They have some very nice Pinot Noirs but not as good as in Oregon. It will be cold and rainy for the next two days so I’m thinking we’ll be exploring these towns again. Maybe even going to actual vineyards as apposed to tasting rooms.
By the way, Lake Cachuma is suffering from lack of rain and has shrunk considerably. We are also on the edge of where some of the wildfires were in December. One lady said that 3 different fire surrounded this valley but did not burn much of it. Smoke was the biggest problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment