The past two days have been very eventful here in California. We've enjoyed some great scenary, great wines, and some outstanding food.Saturday was the day to begin our wine tasting adventure. We started in Livermore, which is only minutes away from Jamie's apartment. After a delicious lunch at a local dim sum restaurant and watching the US fall to Ghana in the World Cup game, we headed for the vineyards. We sampled wines at three different places, all of which were enjoyable. My favorite was the Thomas Coyne winery. I'm looking forward to ordering some wines from them when they start shipping in the fall. My favorite was their port which had a nice robust taste and was not too sweet or syrupy. Overall a very fine way to spend the afternoon.
Our next day began with more wine tasting! After a brief moment of panic when we realized we could not get out of Jamie's parking garage because of a power outage (his electric gate wouldn't open), Ida came to the rescue. She showed up with bagels, coffee, and a car that was not trapped in the garage. This time we headed north to the Sonoma wine country. We visited several wineries, all in very close proximity to each other. We started at Hook and Ladder and met one of the wine makers. They took us through ten different wines starting with the whites and ending up with some of the more robust reds. Delicious. We then visited three more wineries ending up at Deloach vineyards. We tried a Zinfandel and a Tawny (similar to a port) and several other wines. The woman that helped us out was a riot. Between the service, the previous tastings (life was pretty good by this point in the day) and the fact that we were in Sonoma wine country I ended up buying a couple bottles of wine to take home.
After a brief nap in the car and lunch at Mom's Apple Pie restaurant we headed to Muir Woods to see giant redwood trees. The park is nestled in a valley in the countryside surrounding San Francisco Bay. It's actually within a half hour drive of the Golden Gate Bridge and the city itself. The trees were awe-inspiring and spectacular. We spent time on a mile or two long path that wound its way around the basses of the giant trees. One of the areas, Cathedral Grove, has a particularly impressive grouping of trees. As we walked through the forest was silent and everyone stood in awe of the massive redwoods.
We also saw a spotted owl in the trees and watched it swoop down into the stream below and catch a frog. It brought the frog back up into its tree and enjoyed the meal while we all stood, taking it's picture. The shot below is the owl looking up from it's feast.
After Muir woods we came back to the city over the Golden Gate Bridge. There are some wonderful views of the city from the cliffs overlooking the bay on the west side of the bridge. We stopped and took pictures and then drove over the bridge on our way back to town.
From the bridge we headed to the piers along the waterfront to catch a ferry out to Alcatraz. Our plan was to tour the prison and get some great views of the city from the water. Unfortunately we didn't realize it until we were almost to our destination that the time on our reservation was 6:45 PM and not 7:45 like we had originally thought. When we arrived at the pier it was already 6:50, so Ida dropped off Jamie and we waited to see if there was something we could do. As it turns out our best option would be to get standby tickets for the following day so that's what we ended up doing. In the end I think everything worked out best because by the time the ferry debacle had ended we all realized we were starving. So instead of a depressing tour of a prison we ended up having a lovely dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant and then later took some photos of the city from the top of a parking garage. Not quite what we planned, but a lovely time all the same.
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