Getting the flavor of...Southern California’s Little Denmark

Southern California’s Little Denmark

Windmills and traditional Danish architecture give Solvang, Calif., the feel of “a surreal Scandinavian theme land,” said Norma Meyer in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Founded in 1911 by Danish immigrants, this quirky town in the Santa Ynez Valley appears to be particularly enamored of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. There’s a museum in his honor, as well as a park, statues, and costumed impersonators. Skip the tchotchke shops, but notice the good-luck storks on rooftops as you stroll the brick sidewalks to grab an almond-paste-filled kringle at Olsen’s Danish Village Bakery. If you feel the need to “escape from the apple-strudel-scarfing masses,” visit nearby OstrichLand to feed roaming flocks of the world’s largest birds, or gawk at the miniature horses at Quicksilver Ranch. You can also pick up organic lavender products at Los Olivos’s Clairmont Farms—“if you didn’t blow all your money on a souvenir Nordic sword.”

Vegas’s gangster history

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Much of what a visitor sees at Las Vegas’s newest museum “flirts with Mob glamour,” said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. Inside the city’s Mob Museum, you can get your photograph taken in a criminal lineup or “squeeze the trigger on a terrifically loud noise-making machine gun.” Still, a solid history of organized crime’s influence on Vegas eventually takes shape, “in part, perhaps, because the building in which the museum is located demands it.” The museum occupies a former government building, nestled in the city’s “slightly tatty old downtown,” that hosted one of the 1950 U.S. Senate hearings that helped introduce the American public to the brutality and power of the Mob. Sometimes, the nastier bits of local history are handled a bit like “the rapid-fire, monotone warnings on TV commercials for medications—may cause lesions, vomiting, and death.” It’s not as forthright a history as I’d like, “but at least they try.”