Making Lemonade out of Lemons . . .

One thing we did accomplish while we were staying up in Solvang was to get Bryce some solid driving practice and get his learner's permit. We drove down to Goleta on Thursday and Bryce took the test and passed easily. Since the roads around the Alisal are private, Bryce and I spent about 2 hours driving around and getting him accustomed to driving. Here's a video of one of our early lessons:




It was great to get out of the house and just drive around.

We even took Bryce down to Santa Barbara for his first Driver Training lesson on Friday the 15th. After that lesson he was allowed to drive on public roads with an adult driver. So we got even more practice for him after that.

Groundhog Days . . . .

It's really hard to remember what we did that first week from Monday all the way to Saturday. We were in this strange, Groundhog's Day kind of routine. The routine went something like this . . . .

• Wake up
• Check the phone for any new news on the fire and pray it wasn't getting worse
• Go to the gym and work out
• Go to breakfast
• Come home and check on the news about the fire
• Sit around and maybe play guitar
• Cocktail time at 5 pm
• Dinner

One of the positives was that we did get to spend a lot of time with family. We did go to our friends, Mason and Julie Farrell's home for dinner on Tuesday night, which was a nice break. There was another 'refugee' couple staying with the Farrell's so we got to share evacuation stories, which was somewhat therapeutic.

We ended up making two trips to Santa Barbara to grab more items from our home. Bryce and I drove down on Tuesday afternoon and checked on things. It was surreal to be there on that day. There was ash everywhere and we could see the flames burning in the mountains above Montecito. The house was dark, cold and seemingly in a state of suspended animation. The two Christmas trees we had purchased sat in the family room and the living room waiting to be decorated -- they didn't even have lights on them yet. We didn't spend much time there. We just brought in the mail and the UPS packages and grabbed a few items of clothing and 2 more guitars and headed back up to Solvang.

Here's a map of the progression of the fire as of Tuesday, December 12th. The green areas represent areas that had already burned while the orange were either burning currently or had just burned recently.

Food Therapy!

One thing our family has always enjoyed is . . . well . . . good food! And with all the stress of the fire, having good food was, indeed, therapeutic. We had heard great things about this relatively new restaurant in Buellton (only 15 minutes away) called 'Industrial Eats.'

We headed there for lunch on Tuesday, December 12th. The word on the fire back in Santa Barbara was that the firefighters were starting to get the upper hand and the winds were calm. On Tuesday, it seemed like we might be able to go home in a day or two.

Industrial Eats is, not surprisingly, located in an industrial area of Buellton, right off of Highway 246. The menu is scratched up on the wall and on small placards all around the cash register. You order your food at the counter and then they bring it to you. Bryce, Susan and I and our dog, Spike, arrived hungry as we had gone to the gym and had not eaten breakfast.

We ordered a special smoked turkey and arugula sandwich, Quail Eggs and Caviar with toast, and a Caesar salad. All three were incredibly good. It's not the most comfortable environment to sit in, but the food is so incredibly tasty that you really don't care!

We ended up eating at this place (I'm embarrassed to say) THREE times. Seems a bit decadent now, but it was therapeutic.

The next time we went, I got a few shots of the dishes we ordered, which included raw yellowtail with avocado and Pot Au Fueu:

Our Home Away From Home . . .

We were very lucky to be able to evacuate to our family house at the Alisal Guest Ranch in Solvang. It's a place we spend weekends during the summer and occasionally weekends during other times of year. So, unlike most evacuees who either had to stay at a hotel or a friends' house, we were able to stay in a familiar, nice place.

My parents and my brother, Jim and his family evacuated to cottages within the Alisal Guest Ranch -- so they were, essentially, in a hotel/resort.

We were particularly happy to have both of our pets there. Our dog, Spike, could sense that things were out of kilter with us. Max, our cat, seemed oblivious -- however, he did seem to really enjoy all the extra attention we gave him. As far as the cat was concerned, this fire was a great thing -- more food, more petting, more attention.

Our first night there we tried to get our minds off of the fire and went to a movie in Buellton. We saw 'Just Getting Started' with Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones. It wasn't very good, but we had a few laughs.

Monday night we all got together as a 'refugee' family and had dinner at the Alisal in the main dining room.

A turn for the worse and time to evacuate

At 2:30 am on Sunday morning we woke to one of the eeriest sounds we've ever heard. Though my cell phone was turned off, Susan's was on and we heard one of those civil alert tones that we used to hear and see on TV when they would say 'This is a test of the emergency broadcast system.' The whole concept of alerting people about these types of emergencies via cell phone is somewhat new and we had never heard this before. But we had an idea why we received it.

We got up and checked Twitter and various other news feeds. The fire was getting much worse in Carpinteria and moving very fast toward Cate and the rest of Carpinteria. From the fire maps we checked, it looked like Cate would be enveloped by the fire any minute. Though it turned out that the alert we had received was, technically, a glitch and was later rescinded, we decided it was the right time to get up and gather up our valuables. Though this might have seemed overly conservative to some, since were still many miles away from the fire, we decided that all of the uncertainty and the terrible smoke and ash were good enough reason to gather our things and head to the Santa Ynez Valley to our family house there.

So we spent 3 hours packing up valuables, woke up Bryce, and took two cars up to our place in Santa Ynez. We arrived at 6:30 am and went straight to bed!

While we were evacuating, here's what things were looking like at Cate School:

The Beast Continues to Grow . . .

Thomas Fire Nearly Destroys Cate's Rival, Thacher

On Friday morning we awoke to the news that the Thomas Fire had spread to the campus of Thacher School in Ojai on the fire's Northeastern edge. It was only due to the valiant effort of a contingent of firefighters that the campus was spared. The fire burned all around the campus. Here's a shot of Thacher's Head of School, Michael Mulligan, standing on the edge of campus on the morning of December 8th:

The Thomas Fire was burning in two different directions and on one side was Thacher School and on the other side, Cate School, was now directly in the fire's path.

We took the rest of the boys who were with us to the airport mid morning on that Friday. The smoke was getting worse in Santa Barbara and we were hearing that the fire was, unbelievably, approaching Carpinteria. We got word from Cate that the school was now under a mandatory evacuation and the fire department was preparing to use the school as a staging area to fight the fire.

Here's another shot of our front yard as the smoke continued to grow in Montecito:

Here's a shot of the athletic field at Cate looking to the east where the fire was approaching from:

On Saturday morning, December 9th we got word that the fire's progress had slowed somewhat and that Cate was still safe. At this point the fire's southwest front was burning near Rincon point at the edge of Carpinteria and into the hills above highway 150 -- also on the edge of Carpinteria. We went to bed on Saturday night feeling somewhat less concerned and hopeful that the firefighters were gaining the upper hand . . .

More Smoke and the arrival of Refugees . . . .

On Wednesday morning, December 6th, we got word from Cate School (where our youngest son is a boarding student) that although the fire was still many miles away from the school they had made the decision to send kids to local family homes and get them off campus. The smoke was getting worse and worse in Ventura, Carpinteria and Santa Barbara. Here's a photo taken from our front yard looking toward the Montecito Valley Ranch Community Green:

We offered to host any Cate students from out of town who needed a place to stay. Bryce arrived on Wednesday afternoon with 5 of his buddies from the Lido dormitory. All the boys were sophomores and it seemed like they were going to eat us out of house and home!

Breakfast for a bunch of hungry boys!

It was fun to have these kids here in the house with us. They all had sleeping bags and spent two nights in our media room where they watched movies and checked the progress of the fire on their phones and laptop computers.

After two nights with the boys here with us, the school coordinated their departures back to their homes. The boys hailed from New Jersey, Texas, Seattle, Los Angels and Beijing. While they were here, the school decided to cancel the rest of the semester and begin Christmas vacation early -- 10 days early. We would later learn how smart that decision was . . . .

Power outages and Smoke - The first days of the Thomas Fire

Ominous Beginnings . . . 

It was Monday night, December 4th when the power went out for the first time. Susan and I were relaxing, watching a series on NetFlix when the power went out at about 10 pm. We took it as a sign it was time for bed. Unfortunately, the power went on and off a few times during the night, which was not conducive to a good night's sleep.

When we woke up on Tuesday morning, we learned that the source of the power outage was a fire burning in Santa Paula. Santa Paula is forty miles south and east of Santa Barbara, not far from Ojai.

I went out on my usual Tuesday morning bike ride with Adam and Chris. There was a fair amount of smoke in the air from the fire -- the wind must have been blowing east to west. So we decided to take a different route than usual to avoid the smoke. Instead of riding east toward Carpinteria, we headed North and up into the hills above Montecito and Santa Barbara. As soon as we got to the top of Ortega Ridge we could see a large plume of smoke out in the distance. It's always a bit surprising to me how much closer we actually are to things than we think we are. This fire was burning 40 miles away and we could smell the smoke and see the smoke plume easily. It takes at least an hour to drive to Santa Paula from where we live in Montecito and yet we were already experiencing some of the effects of this fire. We rode high up into the hills of Montecito, not realizing that the landscape we were riding in would soon be completely changed.


From the route map above, you can see that the northern leg of our ride is exactly the southern boundary of where the Thomas Fire burned a full week later. The hills where we were riding on that Tuesday morning look COMPLETELY different today. In fact, that area is still under mandatory evacuation so you can't even go there yet.

I do remember feeling concerned as we took a couple of breaks during the ride to take in the views. It's always beautiful to ride up into the hills and look out over the Santa Barbara Channel and the Channel Islands three thousand feet below. But I couldn't help looking to the east where the smoke plume was growing.