Hi Everyone!
There have been a lot of changes happening in our world over the last few months, and yesterday was a big day for us. We have been in the process of changing our priorities, and getting ready to uproot our lives so that we can move closer to the beach. We both love the beach and the type of lifestyle living near it will create for us. This decision to re-locate to a place more fitting for what we want out of life influenced us to apply to new jobs in San Diego. We have been going through the job application process for months, but it looks like my husband is about to secure his job there (we’re keeping our fingers crossed).
Knowing this move was in our near future, we put our house on the market before we left for Peru, so we would be ready to move when we needed to and could take advantage of the Fall market. We ended up accepting an offer right after we got back from our trip, and we have been consumed by the escrow process, packing, and re-locating temporarily to Santa Barbara since then (poor us having to stay in Santa Barbara for a few weeks…).
After a long-awaited 6 weeks, our house finally closed yesterday! To celebrate selling our first house, we decided to drive up to the Santa Ynez Valley/Solvang to bike around and visit a few wineries. I have always wanted to do this, and it was so much fun that I would definitely do it again!
Since it was our first time trying this, we decided to park in Solvang, grab a few sandwiches for a picnic, and bike to a few of our favorite wineries. We ended up biking through Solvang, then on the bike path on the side of Highway 246, and down North Refugio Rd to Sunstone and then Kalyra.
Both wineries have beautiful, yet different settings, and delicious wines. Sunstone tends to have better reds, and Kalyra tends to have better whites in my opinion. Usually we are huge fans of reds, but because it was so hot, and we had been biking, we both were very into the whites, and enjoyed those far more than we usually do.
Sunstone Winery has a Tuscany/Italian type feel to it with it’s beautiful stone tasting room and cellars, rustic/Italian farmhouse kitchen, and beautiful courtyard with a number of wooden tables perfect for sipping wine and having a picnic. We spent some time tasting their wine, having lunch, and then hopping back on our bikes to go to Kalyra.
Kalyra is a winery run by a gentleman from Australia, so he tends to follow the Australian wine-making trends, rather than California’s. Many of their wines are unique and I love them. The tasting room is very casual, laid back, and comfortable. It also has a great patio on a small hill, which makes for a very nice view of the beautiful scenery and wineries close by. They also specialize in dessert wines, which are my favorite. I like that they have a dessert wine flight and a regular wine flight, but also include a dessert wine on the regular flight. Not to mention, they included some dark chocolate with it, so they certainly won more of my heart.
Interesting fact: for those of you that have seen the movie Sideways, Kalyra is one of the wineries in the movie (where Sandra Oh’s character works).
After enjoying Kalyras’ wines, we road back to Solvang, to walk around the cute Danish themed town, to check out the shops, and of course, to stop in a few of the overly abundant Danish bakeries, chocolate shops, and candy stores.
It was an absolutely beautiful, sunny day that was relaxing, active and just what we needed to relieve a little stress. The last part of our escrow has been a stressful process involving several bumps in the road, so we were very happy and excited to finally celebrate the closing and our newly found freedom! We both feel that even though we had to make a number of very difficult decisions, we are incredibly excited for the next few months ahead. In our hearts, we know we have made the right decisions and that we are ready to move on.
