Notes from the Road, Part 4 (the unusual)

I'll start this post with a photo of something that totally cracked me up in the kitchen of Hearst Castle. It was inside a glass cabinet full of old tins of medicines, as well as kitchen spices and condiments.

Thank God for modern medicine! I also wanted to share photos of the charming gentlemen we met at Venice Beach the other night...

And because you are wondering; yes, I was prepared to give him a dollar or two. However, by the time I came back with change, he was gone. (I usually give money to people who put some effort into their panhandling.)

Now, here's a guy I'm sure the kids will never forget. We saw this van in a parking lot behind the Visitor's Center in Santa Barbara, so of course, we had to go check it out.

Upon closer inspection, the van appeared to be a traveling piece of artwork, created by a very friendly, talkative "character," whose name I am ashamed to say we did not get. This man has the familiar, 1960's-inspired philosophy that Love can change the world. As we walked around the van, admiring his work, he prattled on and on about detail after detail and how it represented his theme. And when I say detail, I mean detail, inside and out. Notice the dashboard. Yes, that's like three rows of figurines just on the bottom of the visual field. And here's a photo of what you see when he proudly opens the vehicle's sliding door.I didn't ask, but I would make a conservative guess that there are like a bajillion figures/objects glued to the outside of this vehicle, from top to bottom. This is the driver's side door.In this photo, Polly Pocket and friends pay homage to KISS. He was actually very interesting and seemed like a genuinely nice guy. In fact, he extolled the virtues of hemp as a fuel source (for cars, not people) and instructed the girls to never do drugs. (Never mind that he followed this up with the "fact" that marijuana is not actually a drug; it's just "natural." Anyway, the girls enjoyed meeting this character, we made a donation to his cause, and had some "teachable moments" in the minutes following our encounter.

And finally, in a more mainstream example of the differences between Wisconsin and California cultures, we came upon this scene on the beach in Santa Barbara...It's "surf camp!" We went on further, in search of a tide pool, but were unsuccessful. Hopefully, tomorrow will be more fruitful. (Ha ha. Get it? "Fruit"ful? I didn't even do that on purpose!)