A Wunnerful, Wunnerful Day!

• I was up at the crack of dawn this morning for a road trip with my friend Sandy. She spends 6 months each year here in Golden Village and the other 6 months living (in a manufactured home) under the Lion’s Gate Bridge in West Vancouver. She laughingly calls herself “the troll”.

• Thankfully Sandy has spent enough winters in Southern California that she knows the winding route of highways, byways and interstates required to travel the 61 miles from Hemet, on the desert, to Carlsbad, on the coast. (The rolling Pacific Ocean waves crashing onto a beach were a familiar and welcome sight!)
  

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• A perfect place to commemorate the first day of spring, the Carlsbad Flower Fields cover 52 acres of which 50 are dedicated to ranunculus and two to other specialty flowers; sweet peas, orchids, poinsettias and the like. Only about 2% of the flowers are sold, the rest are allowed to complete the growth cycle and each year six to eight million bulbs are harvested for sale at garden centres everywhere.

• Sandy and I accepted the challenge of navigating a sweet pea maze. She had plenty of time to relax on a bench outside the exit while I wandered and wandered and wandered, completely lost, but thoroughly enjoying the rich scent and brilliant colours.

• Another 30 miles on highways, byways and interstates, with the geography changing from ocean beaches to desert rocks to the lush green hillsides and valley nestling the Lawrence Welk Resort in Escondido. Born in a sod house on a tiny farm in North Dakota, leaving home with a fourth grade education, and achieving little success with band names like “The Hotsy Totsy Boys” and “The Honolulu Fruit Orchestra”, he attached his own name to the band and the rest, as they say is history. Parlaying his interest in music into a 41 year run of champagne music and a bubbles on television and making wise investments in real estate and music publishing, the old accordion squeezer became the second wealthiest entertainer in Hollywood (the wealthiest being Bob Hope). I shamelessly admit to having watched and enjoyed the show, back in the day, and even now I occasionally sway along to the sticky-sweet dance maneuvers of Cissy and Bobby re-runs.

• Although the maestro’s plan was to develop an orange grove in the desert, the investment was diverted to the first class golf course and resort, an escape destination for the Hollywood crowd seeking a break from Tinseltown. The small museum and musical theatre are open to lesser mortals such as yours truly and the troll.

• Today’s musical fare was “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, a lavishly costumed, orchestra-accompanied production about a dashing English aristocrat who risks his life to enter France and save innocents from the guillotine. I don’t know how the play was interpreted on the Broadway stage but at the Welk Resort, the hero and his associates avoid detection by pretending to be gay. While I found the mincing and limp-wristed affect to be highly amusing, I’m not so sure about the busload of grey-haired veterans who were also in the audience.

• “A one and a two and … adios, au revoir, auf wiedersehen!”