I take my camera everywhere I go.  Why?  Because you never know when you are going to run into suburban wildlife with your son and dog on a walk like I did today.  We also came back to play cars and we did some awesome drawing and as you can probably tell I’m quite the artist.

“There’s a unique school that’s giving kids from an inner-city neighborhood that only graduates 33 percent of its high school students a shot at college they never had before. Byron Pitts reports on the SEED school, the first urban, public boarding school.”

Our last stop yesterday was to Solvang, CA which I’ll let Wikipedia explain: “Solvang was founded in 1911 on 11,000 acres (4,500 ha) of the Rancho San Carlos de Jonata Mexican land grant, by a group of Danish educators, who traveled west to escape midwestern winters. The city is home to some bakeries, restaurants, and merchants offering a taste of Denmark in California. The architecture of many of the buildings follows traditional Danish style. There is a copy of the famous Little Mermaid statue from Copenhagen, as well as one featuring the bust of famed Danish fable writer Hans Christian Andersen. A replica of the Copenhagen observatory Rundetårn in the scale 1:3 was finished in 1991 and can be seen in the city centre.”

OstrichLand was probably my second favorite stop yesterday, mostly because I love animals so it was fun getting so close to the ostriches.  They are som big, powerful and dare I say even ugly creatures!

Here are some interesting facts I learned from my visit:

• Adult ostriches stand 8′ to 9′ tall and weight 250 to 350 pounds
• Ostriches mature at 2 to 3 years, and breed until 40 years
• An ostrich can reach speeds of 45 MPH
• The oldest ostrich on record is 81 years old
• The ostrich is the only bird with two toes
• An ostrich egg weighs 3 to 4 pounds, the equivalent of 24 chicken eggs.  Ostrich eggs hatch in 42 days
• A good hen lays 40 to 60 eggs a season.  One layed 120 eggs!  Ostrich farming started in Southern Africa in 1857
• Ostriches are vegetarians and eat 3.5 pounds of food a day
• Each ostrich produces 1.5 pounds of feathers per season
• Ostrich hens incubate the eggs during the day, the rooster sits on the eggs at night
• An ostrich chick grows one foot taller each month
• The ostrich is native to Africa
• Ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand.