Since I have access to a car this week, I got the idea to try to drive around and see the Christmas lights here. I normally can't do this at all in this town because, well, if you scroll down to the map picture in this article, you'll see that the bling houses are all located on the far edges of town and are not walkable. I've only actually seen most of those houses when I used to work there and got to see the contest entries because someone was driving me around while they did their voting.

I ended up only hitting one house last night before I went over to L's to bond with the kitty and watch cable TV, though. Maybe (if I get to be around here at all Saturday night, or need to entertain Mom later in the month) I'll see more later. But I decided to start out with seeing the bliingiest house in town. I can't help but mentally compare this sort of thing to Casa del Pomba, which, btw, I WILL GET TO BE TOURING AGAIN NEXT WEEK, so you can look forward to another entry about that whenever I get net access. While ...well, I'll call it the Snoopy House....doesn't do walk through tours, it does have a train and its own radio station and light shows. And while there aren't indoor tours, I did actually get to see the inside of the place (again, when I worked at the newspaper and knew the house owner personally and got to go to a party there. I probably have an entry on this somewhere...) and yes, it was spectacular.

However, finding it was...interesting. Now, technically I knew where the place was. It's quite a drive, but I knew how to find it. But I started out the drive from the north side of town (I think L's cat is going to run out of food before she returns, so I was hitting Petco) and figured eh, maybe I should use the GPS for this. And the GPS went even weirder than it was going to Folsom. It kept insisting that I take highway 113. As in, first I had to drive south on it...then it wanted me to get off the freeway, get back on it and go north (note: at this point I'm leaving the damn town entirely), and then it wanted me to go to Winters...I don't know what the fuck was going on, but I eventually just went the same old route I normally know of to find the dang house. To be honest, this is kind of why I didn't go look for any other houses before going home--if the GPS was going to be this much of a pain in the ass today, fuck it.

But the house was very cute. Alas, I only took shots with the camera phone and lord, they weren't good. But you can kind of get an idea here. I parked the car at the neighbor's house and walked around for a bit and talked to the other girl looking at the house, and then got back in and turned on the radio to watch the 7 p.m. show.

* This was when the light show was going on and lights were blinking off and on.
* The door area.
* Train shot.
* Train tracks.
* Snoopy and date countdown.
* Inside Snoopy's house.
* Decorated tree.
* The Grinch and the radio.
* One of the animated signs.
* Top of the house shot. (Not very good, sorry, every shot I took came out blurry.)

The lower sign just advertised the radio, but the top sign up in the window had some funny bits. I attempted to write down some of the messages. They went along the lines of this:

"Santa Express to Control Tower: Experiencing difficulties... Rudolph's nose has gone out... please advise. Control Tower to Santa Express: Suggest you change Rudolph's batteries. Contact that pink bunny and ask what kind he uses."

"Cargo Bay to Santa Express: We need more room for 12 partridges, 22 turtle doves...(honestly, I lost track of all of them, it finishes out with...) and 12 drummers. The noise is deafening."

It was fun. More entries later along these lines, hopefully.

previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry