Sunday - was raining when we took the 28X in (VERY EARLY; 4:30am, boo) but snowing by the time we boarded, so had to sit >40min for de-icing and a protective gel application. The latter was fun on takeoff - ramping up the engines changed the frequency of window vibrations, so you could watch the progression until it all blew off the plane. It was a long day, but we had surprisingly decent Mexican food at the DFW airport (although the chain was founded by a Greek family, sort of incongruent). Finally met up with the Adelmans around 3pm, and took their rental black Chevy Impala to check in at Livermore Best Western, which is currently shrinkwrapped for renovations. That was kind of exciting. For dinner we hit Wente's, a winery that even I kind of recognize. The food was awesome and mostly local/organic, but strangely enough, it was served with Norwegian bottled water... we opted out of dessert there, instead heading to Loard's ice cream shop where Sylvia had spent time as a kid. It didn't look like it had changed much since, with the same menu and bright pink and white vinyl seats as I imagine it always had. Pretty neat.
Monday - Stopped at the historic (?) Donut Wheel from Sylvia's childhood before we set off for the day. The drive to Yosemite was spent alternately sleeping and guessing which flowering trees were almonds or other produce. Also the land out that way is really pretty, and some of the farmland has mysteriously jagged rocks jutting up. After clearing up some room confusion at the Yosemite Lodge, we walked around the Falls loop & found the Ansel Adams gallery that I remembered from the cross country trip. They had an original Adams print that was gorgeous for $45,000; it was way better but probably not 45,000x better than the postcard. You can guess which I got. Got a fairly good meal at the sit-down part of the restaurant there and went back to play Pitch & drink wine. I haven’t played Pitch since Puerto Rico, probably, so it was fun to brush up.
Tuesday - hiking day! After some cafeteria-style breakfast, we did the Yosemite Falls loop again so we could see how the morning mist had frozen around the falls and also to see them in brighter sun than yesterday. From there we decided to hike to Mirror Lake since it was "only" 2 mi away...but we kept finding signs that still said it was 2mi away for at least a half hour or so. Pretty confusing with all the snow on the ground, which also makes the trails fairly treacherous for those of us in tennis shoes (ie all of us). It was a great hike though. We covered some good ground with awesome views of the Royal Arches, which look to have dropped boulders bigger than my apartment on the valley floor. Finally we got to the lake, which wasn't so mirror-y when frozen over, but still quite pretty. Took the YART bus from stop #17 back to #4 to get lunch from the deli, then headed back to see Vernal Falls at stop #16. Piecemeal hikes because at least Sylvia and myself were feeling a bit sore. Very happy with the YART transportation anyway, they’re clean buses and some drivers give a kind of tour. The Vernal Falls hike was partially closed due to weather, and the stuff that was open was incredibly challenging, but we made it. Very hard not to love this place; it’s so pretty! Everything is so different than it was in July, but it’s also significantly less crowded so I guess that's your tradeoff. My favorite picture spot from last July is apparently under about 10 ft of snow at the moment (the whole Tioga pass road is closed) so I guess we will have to come back to recreate it. I would come back anyway, without any reasons…
Wednesday - passed some magnificent vistas and windy roads on the way back to Livermore to meet with the Adelman broker... Then we had a quick lunch at Mr. Pickles (I had a chicken, cheese, avocado and bacon sandwich) before pressing onwards to Napa Valley. We had just enough time to hit Beringer for the last tour through their cave cellars and learned a lot about their process. Tasted a $115/bottle cabernet that was awesome, amongst other things. All the Napa wineries are really pretty - not just because the fields look nice, but also because all the tasting rooms have different (and quite fancy!) styles. The sun setting, we drove onwards to the Old Crocker Inn, which is kind of up in the middle of nowhere with the frogs and windy roads. They directed us ~10mi away (that's close around here, apparently) for pizza at La Diavola, in a cute part of Geyserville. It was a pretty fancy pizza place that is also a salumeria (makes their own sausage & meats), so their pepperoni was particularly awesome. We had an excellent deep dish (“Sicillian”) style pizza, plus a meat, potato, egg, arugula, lentil and lemon salada. After retreating for the night, we watched Salt just because they have a lot of movies on deck here. Then slept in my first four-poster bed and with a little gas fireplace to heat the room. It's a cute bed & breakfast, with lots of thoughtful things like chocolate & wine glasses w/ opener & water, but it has a pretty weird decor for sure.
Thursday - Winery day! Had a great breakfast at the Inn - walnut zucchini muffins with local honey, then poached eggs and salsa on top of polenta. Very filling, so we were ready to start drinking with Tony's (co-owner of the Inn) recommendations. Headed to Bella, which was entirely underground in caves – convenient for the drizzly day. Very neat setup, and good zinfandels. Next was Preston, an organic farm & winery, where we picked up sourdough, cheese, and a tasting amongst some fat winery cats. Hit Raymond Burr, held a golden globe from '61 (heavy!), looked at orchid photos and drank some pretty awesome port. Then on to David Coffaro, which looked almost closed - only the bar light was on, and the rest were off. The guy running the show was very knowledgeable about the whole process, though (some of them aren't). I feel like we're getting a pretty good education about organic vs non, cork vs screwtop, how to make blends, why late harvest wines are sweet (more sugars but same yeast dieoff point), mustard fixing nitrogen in the fields and how yields of tons/acre vary with varietal and age. We bought our first wine there - much more expensive than Finger Lake wines but it seemed appropriate. Everything was pretty good! Finally, we checked in for a tour at Michael-Schlumberger (yes, descendant of the Big Oil family) that the Inn booked for us at 2pm; turned out to be about a two hour tour just for us! Knowledgeable guy, sun finally came out, watched the sheep and ducks and gopher holes on top of what he was explaining in the vineyard. Good to have that tour as a little break to sober up after three other places. The actual tasting was very relaxing, on a porch with something that smelled much like honeysuckle. The guy gave us a recommendation for La Hacienda, a mexican place near the Inn, to eat. We only had bread&cheese for lunch so we decided to just head straight there (after a quick detour for a valley photo op at Sbaglia). The plates were ENORMOUS, plus we ordered sopapillas just for the hell of it. Supremely stuffed, we rolled back to the hotel and watched The Gods Must Be Crazy. Oh yeah, and got official notification that EWB-CMU got approved to travel this summer! WOO. What a good wine-filled, food-filled day...
Friday – woke up at 5:20am to a text message from Mom about the Japan tsunami and how it might affect costal CA areas...given that we were super high up, I wasn’t that worried, but it became a running gag on the trip. Ah well. Breakfast was again an impressive meal, with mango&yogurt smoothie “crockertinis” and Belgian waffles. Definitely a solid B&B despite the weird décor and the rowling old keeshond (?) dog. Afterwards, we decided we were all wined out, but we hit the Francis Ford Coppola winery just to see it. It’s a huge estate, a wine I actually recognize, and had cool Apocalypse Now and other movie memorabilia. Very ritzy, but worth seeing anyway. Then we drove to Muir Woods, and the roads were as windy as I remember! We ended up taking a 2-mi hiking trail which was really cool, and the sun stayed out today which made everything prettier, primeval even. The trail covered really steep slopes with a lot of mud at spots, so my legs got pretty sick of it, but it was worth it.
Then we moved on to the San Francisco Hotel Boheme, which was decorated a la 50s Beat poets style. Fairly strange but we’re definitely touring off-the-path kind of places! They recommended a place called House for dinner; I got tasty sesame asparagus and shrimp wontons, but Peter’s dish totally stole the show. It was a mushroom risotto, but the mushroom garnish was sliced supremely thin, so that it wiggled with the heat and air currents. Totally cool. We then walked past some topless bars (apparently) and up Grant. Very steep, with VERY pretty houses that must be super expensive. From there we saw the Coit tower at night but didn’t go up; instead we walked back down to Pier 39 to see the seals (loud, stinky, silly) and get some ice cream. Saw my first ever Biscoff outpost (usually those are reserved for Delta flights only) and got that new cookie paste they came out with. It’s literally a spread made of biscoff cookies, supposedly the European alternative to PB, and I think it’s hilarious (and tasty). We also stopped by Boudin bread so peter’s dad could get some chocolate raisin bread, got an irish coffee (or hot nutty Irishman) from Tiernan’s as is apparently typical, and walked back up to the hotel. They serve complementary crème sherry at night, kind of strange, but now I know what it tastes like. We again all played Pitch & drank the rest of the wine while watching the news. Pretty fun, minus the tsunami…
Saturday – Our hotel is right next to a pretty awesome bakery, so we had éclairs, blueberry pastries, a really frilly paste-filled thing, and all sorts of fun sweets for breakfast. This fueled our walk around neighboring Chinatown and up to Coit Tower. Inside the tower is filled with murals, and there’s an awesome view at the top. Equally interesting were the various foreign coins in the windowsills. We must have taken the easy way up to the tower, because we walked a lot farther down many many stairs on the way to the Ferry Terminal. We ended up at Levi square, which was notable for its “this area contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer” sign. Oh California. On our way we stopped in for some chocolate tasting at TCHO, which was super fun. Then we were finally at the farmer’s market! It was huge and so cool. I guess it helps that a lot more is in season in CA vs Pittsburgh, but it was pretty darn impressive. We then hit more chocolate places (Recchiuti’s! and some others) and met Molly Woodward, exciting! None of us girls were really hungry so we walked around and got some crazy Korean tacos with seaweed shells while the boys had their cheap dim sum in the back. It was a beautiful sunny day to be by the Golden Gate bridge. Then Molly departed, I had a quick nosebleed, we walked back up Embarcadero to revisit the Pier 39 seals in the daylight. Just as goofy looking, but this time my camera could see it. Was SUCH a gorgeous day, we lucked out for sure. Later Peter and I would discover that our noses had burned a little – you know you’re a grad student when walking around after noon does that…. Anyway! Then we drove to San Mateo for our la fermiere yogurt, from the only such distributor in the U.S. We got honey, lemon, and vanilla; they said they had had a chestnut flavor that’s new but it sold out. Oh well…six yogurts for $25, not soooo bad compared to the price of a ticket to France. We brought them carefully to our fancy Half Moon Bay Best Western fridge (in our huge room, compared to the city hotel), did a quick change, then went up to the Mountain House for dinner. It looked very out of the way but is apparently a big deal for those that live in the hills. It was a very neat (peter’s strip steak was curled up in a spiral, cute) and filling dinner, plus we ordered three desserts – vanilla bread pudding with whiskey sauce, fruit pavlova, and a blueberry lemon tart. It was our last big meal of spring break, had to go all out! Then we came home and packed up while the parents got Sara. Finally, time to sleep before the big travel day.
Sunday – fancy fancy yogurt for breakfast!!! Quite exciting and tasty. Honey was probably the least popular flavor, although it was still good; lemon and vanilla were awesome. Hee hee! We drove by the Half Moon Beach but didn’t get out – quick, see the Pacific one last time! – before going to the airport. It was a pretty grey day – a good day to leave. The SJC airport has free internet - woo hoo! - but my laptop battery appears to not work at all so it’s not that useful. Oh well. Back to pgh we go, I guess….with our bottle of wine, biscoff spread, and chocolates as souvenirs. Still no clothes for me, oh well. Next time!
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