Camel Racing

My Camel Racing Cowboy Hat

I am proud to be a card-carrying member of the International Order of Camel Jockeys, an honor reserved only for the very brave—and the very insane. I found out about camel racing back in 1989 when I was a teenager working at a saloon up in Virginia City, Nevada. I was the waitress and my dad was the bartender at the old Long Branch Saloon and we ran the place for an entire winter.

Camel racing in historic Virginia City has been a tradition since the first races were organized by the gold miners during the Gold Rush era in the 1860’s. Virginia City is an authentic mining town that’s been completely restored in Old West splendor and was a primary location for the TV show, Bonanza. The International Camel Racing World Championship is held there every year and attracts thousands of spectators. Anyone can enter the races after attending ‘camel boot camp’, a short training session with the camel handlers. Those who make it through the first and second days of elimination races get to compete in the world championship race on Sunday.

After a weekend trip to Virginia City a couple of years ago, I decided that it would be fun to race camels for one of the charities I volunteer with. Looking back on it now, that decision was the most severe, “what was I thinking?” moment of my life. As I walked out to the track to run my first race, I was thinking, “what in the hell am I doing this for?” I was numb with terror and my knees felt like rubber. But all of my friends, not to mention a pretty big arena crowd were watching and there was no way I could wimp out after coming this far.

As I got on the camel, it made a terrifying noise, kind of like a Wookie, but much more guttural and I had a pretty bad feeling about this camel racing business. Before I knew it, I was flying down the track at 35 mph on 1700 pounds of camel—and I was winning the race!

It was thrilling to actually stay on the camel and cross the finish line in first place. But that was when the trouble began. In the moment I threw the reins to the handler, my camel went insane and decided to scrape me off on the fence. She slammed her body against the rails and I lifted my leg just before it was crushed. With both feet out of the stirrups now, my camel managed to bust off the straps on the saddle, sending me tumbling off her 9 foot high hump into the dirt on my butt. All I remember is watching the camel trample the saddle I’d been sitting in just a second earlier. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life and a moment that I wouldn’t trade for the world. “Yeah, thanks,” I mumbled to the camel as she charged off in a cloud of dust. Then the handlers dragged me off the track to safety.

I retired from camel racing after that one race, but I still go up for the Virginia City Camel Races with my charity every year.

My camel racing cowboy hat stays in my office and I like to wear it when I’m writing. That crazy hat with the pink snakeskin hatband and the camel racing logo reminds me to take chances, to get dirty every once in a while and most importantly, to live life with a vengeance.

Bluebird

Advice from an Irish Matchmaker

An Irish blessing for the girls from

Mrs. O'Rourke, famous Irish Matchmaker

"May this pair of mighty knickers never fit your 'arse."

Desperate Times In Real Estate

Desperate times in real estate call for desperate measures.
After the burst of the housing market bubble in Southern California, Realtors and sellers are inclined to throw in a few extras to sweeten up potential buyers. This charming 2 bedroom bungalow in Sunland, California comes with a mature lemon tree and a 20 lb. slab of butter, all for $650,000.

I'm kidding about the slab of butter, but the rest is no joke! In case you were wondering, the house was sold and the lobster disappeared.

Serendipity in the Orchards, a tale of fate, love and destiny

Serendipity in the Orchards

A true story about fate and destiny.

Throughout history, the olive has symbolized immortality and fruitfulness, its lore and magic still evident today in the tale of a California olive grower named Craig Makela. This restless soul has found abundance and happiness at the end of a journey with more twists of serendipity than the roots of an olive tree.

Nestled in the rugged mountains of Santa Barbara, California is The Santa Barbara Olive Company owned by growers, Craig and Cindy Makela. Although their gourmet food products are now available in over 30,000 retail stores, the company came from humble beginnings and climbed a rocky uphill path with fate as its only guide.

A native of Santa Barbara, Craig Makela had always dreamed of working with the land and soil as if it were in his very blood. His aspirations to become a winemaker led him to the Santa Barbara Winery as a young man. Despite his college education, Craig took an entry level position at the winery where he started out scrubbing wine barrels. But he watched and listened, learning everything he could about the business and after just two years with the company, Craig had moved up to an executive position in marketing.

In 1981 Craig met the woman of his dreams, Cindy White, also a marketing executive. “It was love at first sight,” Craig smiles. “She was just too beautiful. She had patience with me.” The couple was married and soon after started a family.

The following year, some of Craig’s friends owned a startup, gourmet olive company and were struggling to keep their partnership together. They offered to sell the business to Craig and Cindy. Although Craig had a successful career in the wine world and knew little about olive growing, he quit his job and bought the olive company on a whim that would change his life forever. For $15,000 the Makela’s now owned a small orchard of authentic Santa Barbara olives, a setup of crude bottling and processing equipment and a micro business with just a handful of customers.

For two years, the Makela's ran the Santa Barbara Olive Company out of a tiny, one-car garage and could barely make ends meet. But their persistence and marketing savvy finally paid off when the Neiman Marcus catalog placed a large order for the company’s specialty olive gift packs, putting the home-based olive business on the epicurean map of the world. Hiring high school students to help fill the deluge of orders and even utilizing their four-year-old daughter to help with labeling bottles, the Makela’s had finally tasted success.

With the business prospering, Craig and Cindy decided that it was time to expand their operation. The couple leased a small trailer on several acres of rocky and barren land in Santa Barbara where Craig single-handedly planted a grove of five-hundred olive trees. Just as their dreams and their olive orchard began to flourish, a stranger showed up on the property one afternoon demanding that they vacate the premises immediately. The Makela's discovered that the people they had leased the property from hadn’t actually owned the land and they’d been mercilessly swindled out of their dreams.

Even with the business in shambles and losing everything they had including the trees, the Makela's refused to give up and sowed their seeds once again in a new orchard. Struggling through the next year with little stock, the superior quality of their organic Santa Barbara olives continued to win them loyal fans including President Ronald Reagan who sent gift packs of their famous olives to world leaders that very Christmas. Another devoted fan of the Santa Barbara Olive company was famed chef, Wolfgang Puck. Craig recalls driving his battered old truck down to Puck’s first restaurant in Los Angeles to deliver half gallons of his sun dried olives for the chef’s gourmet pizzas.

With their line of specialty olive products growing in popularity, the Makela’s managed to save enough money to open a small wholesale showroom in the neighboring village of Solvang. No sooner had they set up shop, the Makela’s were bombarded by people knocking on the door asking if they might come inside to sample the products. Always generous hosts, Craig and Cindy allowed these curious strangers through their doors and soon after decided to turn the showroom into a gourmet food store. The Santa Barbara Olive Company Store was born and their grand opening ribbon was cut by none other than chef, Julia Childs, another fan of the Makela’s gourmet olives.

Meanwhile Cindy’s days were divided between product marketing and home schooling their three children. With the business and shop thriving, Cindy was able to hire a tutor for their young children. The tutor had the Makela boys create a family tree, a project that would ultimately define the very soul of the family.

The boys traced their local family heritage back to Luis Quintero, one of Santa Barbara’s founders. In 1779 King Carlos III of Spain issued orders to establish a town in Southern California. Forty four people known as pobladores, or settlers made the journey from Sonora, Mexico to Southern California. Luis Quintero was one of the settlers traveling with Governor Filipe de Neve and Father Junipero Serra, the founder of the Mission of Santa Barbara. For his service to the King, the Spanish Government granted Luis Quintero a large parcel of land in Santa Barbara. Quintero married the daughter of a Spanish soldier and together they raised three generations of Quintero’s on their homestead in Santa Barbara.

Maria Caneda was a beautiful woman of Spanish blood and a fourth generation Quintero. In 1860, Maria met a traveling Frenchman named Jules Emile Goux, an aspiring perfumer who had sailed around the Horn with his colleagues, gathering plant cuttings from around the world. Goux had collected samples of mulberry trees, olives and grapes and was headed north on the Camino Real to San Francisco where he and his companions were to depart for France. But as fate would have it, Goux attended a gala party in Santa Barbara where he met Maria Caneda and the couple fell madly in love. Saying goodbye to his traveling companions, Goux stayed behind and married Maria, carving out a life for himself in the rugged coastal community. Among his many successful ventures, Goux established Santa Barbara’s first vineyard, the T.A. Goux Winery and planted acres and of olive orchards, establishing himself as the first commercial olive grower in the United States.

As the owner of The Santa Barbara Olive Company, Craig Makela was astounded to discover that he was related not only to Luis Quintero, one of the founding fathers of Santa Barbara, but that he was also the great, great grandson of John Emile Goux, the man who was Santa Barbara’s first winemaker and who planted the city’s first olive groves, using cuttings from the Spanish missions. For the first time in his life, Craig understood why he had been compelled to work the soil of Santa Barbara – it was in his blood.

The extraordinary Makela family history attracted attention in the local media and olive sales began to soar. Envious of their success, a competitor in the olive business filed a lawsuit against the Santa Barbara Olive Company for cooking up a fraudulent family history. But after Craig and Cindy provided historical documentation, undeniably proving that their lineage was the real deal, the lawsuit was thrown out by the judge.

The Makela's went on to expand their business, purchasing 101 acres of land in the rugged Santa Barbara Mountains. Craig took one look at the barren hillside and was overcome by the feeling that this was the place he was meant to be. Working diligently, he cultivated cuttings from Santa Barbara’s original olive groves and planted 5500 new trees.

Craig’s strong affinity for the land turned out to be more than just a feeling - for the Makela’s were about take another drive down Serendipity Street. Out of curiosity, Cindy decided to conduct a title search on the history of their new property and what she discovered was no less than astounding. The very groves the Makela’s now owned had once belonged to Craig’s ancestor, Luis Quintero and the property had been part of the family’s original homestead back in the 1770’s. If that bizarre coincidence wasn’t enough, Craig met two of his neighbors that turned out to be his long lost cousins. The ancestors of the Quintero family were finally reunited after being separated for over eight generations.

Permanently rooted on their own land, the Makela’s built their dream home on top of the mountains overlooking their orchards and the grand Pacific Ocean. The gourmet kitchen offers sweeping views of the sea and a panoramic view of their herd of Black Angus cattle grazing the hillside. The Makela’s keep a stable of livestock including goats, sheep, chickens, a pet pig and even Frank Sinatra’s 35 year old horse, Frankie. The Santa Barbara Olive Company is a certified organic farm and the manure from the Makela's livestock is used to fertilize the groves of olive trees that flourish on the orchard.

Even though the Makela’s were abundant with success, Craig still dreamed of starting his own winery. Cindy encouraged him to go ahead and plant his vineyards on the property and fate stepped in once again. The only grapes that were available at that particular time were for chardonnay and were only suitable for coastal regions. The grapes were a perfect match for the steep, rolling hills overlooking the sea and the Makela’s named their vineyard Olivos del Mar, Spanish for olives of the sea. Famed winemaker, Chris Whitcraft made the first wine from the Makela’s vineyards and has produced six hundred bottles of the Olivos del Mar Chardonnay. Whitcraft believes that this chardonnay is the finest he’s ever created and the Olivos del Mar is in such demand that Whitcraft will only sell one bottle at a time to buyers.

With his roots deeply planted in Santa Barbara, Craig Makela became the Vice President of the Santa Barbara Historical Preservation Committee and took an interest in the historical Mission of Santa Barbara. Founded in 1786 by the successor of Junipero Serra and Craig’s ancestor Luis Quintero, Craig noticed that the original olive groves that once graced the lands no longer existed. In 2006, Craig and Cindy Makela planted a grove of 100 olive trees in the Meditation Garden on the historical Mission grounds. In a few years the trees will bear fruit and the Santa Barbara Olive Company has agreed to care for and process the olives and produce a private label line of Santa Barbara Mission Olive Oil. Visitors to this historical California landmark will be able to take home a taste of authentic Santa Barbara history.

With a thriving gourmet olive business and a budding winery, Craig is a true believer in fate. “I’m like the Forrest Gump of Olives,” he says with a grin. After spending a day with the Makela’s, I’m convinced that you couldn’t find two more generous people – who lead a truly charmed life.

Bluebird

The Walking Dog in Mojave

Sometimes I drive out to the Mojave Desert to get some space because there's an awful lot of it there. If you ever feel like America is getting too crowded, just drive for an hour or so in any direction and you're sure to find plenty of wide open space.

This picture was taken in a charming little town called Randsburg which is about 30 miles from Mojave down a lonely 2 lane highway. It was a hot day - so hot that the little dog in the photo was looking for an ice cold drink in the air conditioned general store.

Moments like this make life pure bliss.

Bluebird

The Old Man and the Shipwreck Coin

This is a true story.

The Old Man and the Shipwreck Coin

Sometimes inspiration is found in the most unlikely places.

While visiting Seattle a few years ago, I met a stranger who changed my life. I was out in the city one afternoon and I noticed a very old man hobbling along in my direction. As I smiled at him in passing, he winked, and I caught a glimmer of gold and silver dangling from his neck, just below his snowy white beard. Curious, I pointed to the unusual medallion he was wearing. “Excuse me, your necklace is beautiful,” I said. “What is it?”

With a sparkle in his eye, the old man brushed his fingers across the gleaming silver coin which had been set in gold. “This,” he said, “is my inspiration. Have you ever heard the story of Mel Fisher and the Atocha?

“The treasure ship?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “The Senor de Atocha was a Spanish treasure ship that went down on a reef in the Florida Keys in 1622, taking the souls of hundreds and two tons of silver and gold. Almost three hundred years later, a young man named Mel Fisher heard about the treasure and became obsessed with finding the Atocha. It became his life’s work and he searched for it his entire adult life. He was so certain that the treasure was out there, he moved his family onto a houseboat and spent every dime he had looking for the lost ship. Despite his financial problems and the death of his son and another dear friend who died in the search, Mel Fisher refused to give up on his dream, and after 20 years he found the Atocha, recovering the largest shipwreck in history.

“Wow,” I smiled, admiring the gleaming Spanish coin. “It’s beautiful.”

“That, it is,” he nodded, “but that isn’t why I wear it.”

“Why then?” I asked curiously.

“I wear this coin so I never forget to follow my own dreams,” he smiled wistfully. The old man turned and shuffled away, leaving me wondering what dreams might be running through his head.

Last year, I was in the Caribbean and happened to stop into a jeweler’s shop to take shelter from a passing storm. After browsing for a few moments, I noticed something gleaming from beneath the display case. Not only was it a salvaged treasure galleon from the Atocha, but it was encased in a gold setting identical to the one the old man had been wearing. “I’d like to buy that,” I told the shopkeeper.

“It’s a beautiful piece,” he said as I draped the coin around my neck.

“It is, but that isn’t why I bought it,” I winked.

To this day, I wear the treasure coin around my neck and share the story of the old man with everyone who asks about it. This unusual token is a constant source of inspiration and serves as a reminder to persevere toward my goals, no matter what the odds are.

But is gets even better. Just a few months ago I was on a plane and a woman passed by me in the aisle. I noticed that she was wearing a similar coin around her neck. I asked her if it was from the Atocha and she said with a smile that it was. I showed her my coin and I told her the story of how I came across mine. As we talked, there was a young man sitting a few rows away who approached us and showed us his coin from the Atocha that he was wearing around his neck!

That day I met two wonderful strangers on the plane, both of whom were wearing coins from the same shipwreck for the same reason that I was - a reminder follow dreams no matter what the obstacles.

Bluebird

Bluebirds and Sunshine

Welcome to Bluebirds and Sunshine, a place to chat about the sunny side of life.

I'll be blogging about the things that inspire me, things that make me laugh and the unexpected magic of life that is always there if you look closely.

Life is what you make it, so why not make something beautiful?

I look forward to hearing your comments. Thanks for dropping by.

Bluebird