Welcome to our “Summer Adventure” issue. We hope you enjoy our stories about the many adventures you can enjoy in and around our beautiful Santa Ynez Valley. Our aim is to inform our readers about things that are fun to do and safe and sane as well. There are many things for families to choose from that are both enjoyable and educational. Our cover story takes you to a dude ranch with a lot of options to choose from. You can also visit Cachuma Lake for a nature cruise or to hike, or to rent a boat or to launch your own boat. You can camp there or just enjoy looking at the lake and the gorgeous scenery. In addition, many families enjoy walking around our Valley’s five distinctive towns and shopping at the wide variety of small stores.
Couples or groups without children often opt for the adventure of wine tasting, and we have a “Wine Tasting Walking Tour” for Solvang and one for Los Olivos, as well as a full-page map of Wineries and Wine Tasting Rooms throughout the Valley and in the surrounding countryside. If you choose to taste wine, however, and you plan to drive back home or even just back to your motel or hotel, we strongly urge you to choose a designated sober driver who will not participate in any wine tasting.
In an attempt to stem a tide of accidents caused by drunk drivers, the California Highway Patrol and the Santa Barbara County Vintners Association are working together to educate the public, tasting room servers and tour bus operators to promote safe and sane wine tasting. They have received a special grant from the State of California to hold “wet lab” classes to show tasting room staff the effects of wine on people’s reaction times. The grant also pays for special wristbands for tasting room servers to give to designated drivers, who will then be provided with free soft drinks and other gifts. In addition, there are programs to educate tour bus operators to identify designated drivers, provide them with wrist bands and to make sure that when people are dropped off at their cars they are not too intoxicated to drive safely. The grant also pays for ads, such as the one on our back cover, urging people to “Taste Responsibly” and to have a designated driver.
We join the CHP and the Vintners’ Association in urging you to please be safe and sane. This spring we lost a family friend because her car was hit head-on by an alleged drunk driver. We are hereby dedicating this issue to the memory of Laura Cleaves, a law enforcement officer herself, who lived here and was a friend and mentor to so many people in our Valley and beyond, that over 1,000 people attended her memorial service. You can be sure that Laura’s many friends and associates will be on the lookout for potential drunk drivers from now on.
-Wolcott and Teona Schley |