To end the year, we wanted to give Naomi a wonderful Christmas experience. There are not too many places around in the bay area where the neighborhood/stores are all decorated on the outside to represent a Christmas village. So we wanted to take her to Solvang and look at all the dutch style buildings that are decorated on the inside/outside for Christmas.
We booked our stay kind of late, so there were not as many places to choose from. Since there are motels in solvang that do that allow children, we ended up staying at a hampton inn in bulleton. Our trip mostly was netflix in the hotel room with the baby, or being in solvang with the baby (11am-4pm).
-We took Naomi to a bookstore that had a small Hans Christensen Museum on the top floor. It was really informative learning about how he lived and all the books he wrote. We also bought 2 books, one of them had the most beautiful pop up book about tiaras.
There is also this one antique stores that has the most beautiful mechanical antique clocks. Just going into it makes me want to be a watchmaker, or create mechanical things.
The Elverhøj Museum of History & Art is a house that was turned into a museum. One side of the museum was filled with art by danish painters. The other side had rooms that showed what a dutch house would look like. All the colors, and hand painting was beautiful. One of the most interesting thing I read was how the dutch settlers spent so much extra money and made city ordinances to convert all the houses to look dutch. That must have taken a lot of effort to get everyone to take on this endeavor.
We also went to a store that only sold christmas decorations. They told us that because of covid, prices to ship things to the US were so high that they did not buy new inventory. So they were selling out of items, and going through all their back log and stock, which was why they were getting low on a lot of their ornaments. However, the owners were going to Germany soon this year for the christmas ornaments convention to procure more supplies.
One of the new things that I do different when i go shopping is that I actually go into baby/children stores. Those stores are actually one of my favorite to go into, because the workers in there are usually really nice and friendly.
The trip to Solvang with my wife and the baby was very relaxing. We don’t do too much for our trip with the kid, which allowed us to find more time for sleep, and just relaxing. I think the kid loved the place because she loves grabbing all the colorful ornaments.
