West Coast Trip

Well, I'm at SEA-TAC waiting to board my flight to Philly. I can't believe that there is not a starbucks open at the Seattle airport right now. I could really use a coffee right now. Anyway, Venitia was nice enough to drive me to the airport. So, here I sit.......waiting.......and.......waiting..........well, I'm going to catch up on a tv show at hulu.

Today is my last full day in St. Helena. Tomorrow I'm making the 13 hour drive back up to Tacoma. We've managed to save the best for last though. Tonight is Cheers! in town and Thomas friends also throw an after party. It should be a nice send off. Ashleen has also managed to score a babysitter for the event.

http://cheerssthelena.com/movie.php?mov=CheersRock&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=285&width=470

So we headed down to Santa Cruz the other day. It was a lot of fun. Me and Shannon went out onto the pier and got up close and personal with some Sea Lions.

After that we headed down to the boardwalk which is just like an amusement park. Shannon went on several rides by herself. We spent some time in the arcade and the girls managed to win a stuff animal before we headed back north.

We took the senic and historic California Route 1 part of the way back north. It was worth the extra travel time! In fact, the pictures don't do it justice.

[/b]So, Ash and I were served breakfast in bed by Thomas and the girls. That was how we started our girls day off. From there we went to Folie a Deux and Napa Cellars where Martin works. Martin is one of Thomas' best friends. We had a really good tasting there.[/b]

[/b]After that we went to Napa for a laid back lunch and then off again to hit more wineries. Our next stop was Duckhorn. Duckhorn owns several different vineyards around Napa Valley so they have valley wines and high altitude wines. Of course, I liked the 2005 Duckhorn Melot which was $75 a bottle. I walked away empty handed. The best part was when we where leaving and we saw a PT Cruiser Limo. The driver let us look inside and check it out. I will say the outisde is hideous but the inside was pretty cool.[/b]

[/b]After that we went to Benessere and had a tasting. We traded a De Tomas Wine for their Pheonmeon Wine. It was an excellent trade on our part. I also bought a dessert wine there.[/b]

[/b]From there we went to the Castllo di Amorsoa. Of course, we managed to get a free tasting there so we went to the reserved wine room. Ash had the red wines and I had my sweet wines served with sea salt chocolate. Yum! The castle is owned by Dario Sattui who also owns V. Sattui down the road from Ashes house. It was a pretty cool reproduction of a castle. He had it built in the 90's and there can never be another in St. Helena because the city council has passed a law against it. Sattui, of course, was grandfathered in.[/b]

[/b]Our last stop occurred after we had already told Thomas we were on our way home. Berringer was still open and they have really cheap, no class wines- i.e. their aged in stainless steel not french oak, so we stopped for a tasting. We ended up with 6 bottles of wines and a bag to carry them in for $38, not bad.[/b]

[/b]It was a great girls day! We to went several wineries and tasted for free and recieved the trade discount when and if we bought. Nice day overall. After dinner we had smores with the girls. The fire was made from dried grapevines.[/b]

[/b]Any misspellings should be forgiven due the fact that I've visited several wineries and still having more wine at home. Thank you for the consideration. [/b]

Today, we headed off to the Old Faithful of California. It was pretty nice, but not as good as the real Old Faithful in Yellowstone. They also had a petting zoo with Tennesse Fainting goats, other goats, and llamas. Unfortunately, none of the goats fainted while we were there. They also had a bamboo maze. The girls, of course, loved feeding the goats.

On the way back we stopped at the Culinary Institute of America and looked around. They had a really neat corchscrew collection. We ended up buying some of their fancy chocolates.

This past week we've just hung around town and relaxed. It's been nice.