Entries Tagged 'Out and about' ↓

Nice way to display all the Christmas wrapping paper!

While Sara was staying with us this weekend (over on a work trip) we took her to Napa Valley as she’d never been there. With information we’d learned on the previous trip about picnics being widely accepted The Mister investigated wineries that looked like they had good picnic spots before we left with a plan. We visited our new friend the Yountville Coffee Caboose for morning tea … much quieter this time as they weren’t having a parade!

Once we got into Napa Valley we headed straight for Deane & Deluca, the only one outside of New York, and got deli made sandwiches before heading to the first of the wineries that The Mister had picked and the one likely to have the best picnic spot. Jackpot! It was just perfect. Alpha Omega. The woman who greeted us noted our picnic and told us the best place to eat it and offered us a wine tasting outdoors. It was lovely – sitting under trees overlooking a pool and manicured gardens being served and entertained by a retired jet pilot, Bob, who had a very dry sense of humor and with a bit of sparring could be convinced to let us taste the good stuff not on the tasting menu! The chardonnay was fantastic – thick and buttery and Sara and The Mister raved over the reds they tried … desperately trying not to get hooked when they realized Bob was letting them sample from the $80 bottle!

On the last tasting he poured them full glasses … something to take down into the garden to enjoy with our lunch. We sat there for ages and didn’t go to another winery. Just lovely. And quiet as I think it’s nearing the end of the busy winery tour season.

Had the very amazing experience last weekend of meeting someone who we’ve made friends with on Twitter – @thenovicechef who’s cooking and cat tweets we’ve been following for a while. We even made a video for her once so we all know what each other looks like.

She and her husband were in San Francisco for the weekend and we saw a tweet that they were down at the Ferry Building – we were heading down anyway with Sara who had just arrived to stay for the week so I kept my eyes open. I spotted her husband, tall in a line of people waiting for pork sandwiches and rushed up to them – huge hugs – we knew who we were looking at right away!

It was great to meet Jessica and Jorge and we had a lovely lunch in the sun together.

When Jif visited us recently he told us about Muir Woods just out of San Francisco where the giant redwoods live. He’s been to San Francisco a few times before and we had to work so there wasn’t a lot of showing him the city we could, or needed to do. We managed to grab a couple of hours before going to Austin for the Sencha Conference to drive to the woods. Wow – pretty awesome. Very well travelled though, with paths and fences and lots of tourists making noise but beautiful nevertheless. The trees are huge and there was still a serene feel about the place.

(When I first saw this photo I could almost see Bella or Edward emerging from the trees!)

We walk past this every day on the way to work. Needless to say there’s usually an interesting collection of people hanging around outside waiting for it to open. San Francisco is turning out to be a crazy town!

It was nice having ice-cream in Santa Cruz and walking along the beach. About an hour and a half drive south. I think the warmest weather is over now so it wasn’t too crowded. However, not like a beach in New Zealand because running along the edge of it is a boardwalk with fair-ground rides and arcade games. A day at the seaside doesn’t necessarily mean sand in your togs.

Yesterday we had our first drive out to Napa Valley. Friends visiting from New Zealand had a couple of days up there so we decided to meet them for a Sunday drive. It’s probably about an hour to get to the start of Napa Valley – about half the trip being on the freeway and some brown farmland before getting into wine country. I think we’ve been dreadfully spoiled when it comes to beautiful scenery having lived in New Zealand all our lives because to be honest, despite the gushes of how beautiful we’d think wine country was from locals when we told them we were going, we didn’t really see anything any more spectacular than in New Zealand.

We were treated to a blend of Martinborough, Marlborough, Hawke’s Bay and French wine country – the building styles definitely reminded us of European buildings and the fields of grape vines could’ve been from anywhere in New Zealand.

We visited 2 wineries – Rombauer and V.Sattui – which I think were at different ends of the cellar door experience. Both charged around $15 to taste about 3 wines, not taken off the purchase price of anything you bought, however a small discount was given on case purchases. Given the volume of people tasting they’d be making a heap of money – usually we’ve experienced higher prices for things in New Zealand purely because of lower volume so on that model I would’ve expected tastings here to be free – free is actually the norm in New Zealand! (well it was last time I went wine tasting which I admit was years ago…) As to the differences in these 2 places – Rombauer had water, you got to keep the tasting glasses, it was a small intimate cellar with someone who’d worked there for years taking the tasting, who knew how to compare the wines to what we have in New Zealand; V.Sattui was a rather large complex with ‘premium tastings’ offered in a different building to what I assume was regular old wine tastings, they had no water for the tasting, there were loads of people picnicking, a wedding was soon to take place in the grounds, the young guy doing the tasting seemed to be rattling from a script and he’d run out of a few things and was reluctant to open more.

We ended the day up at Auberge du Soleil – a gorgeous retreat on a hillside where we sat and acted like the hoy poloy who surrounded us with our glass of wine each and bowl of fries – lovely view over the valley.

The main road running up the valley from Napa had wineries crammed on either side of the road so it’s quite hard to choose which ones to go to and I could see you could make a week out of it if you could stand doing the same thing every day. It was great to see that a lot of places encouraged people to take their own picnic supplies and lounge around in the winery grounds with their bottle of wine.

Quite a nice manageable day trip if you sort out a couple of places you know you want to go.

Drove over to Sausilito on Saturday with Lance who was visiting for a couple of days – guess you don’t really take your brother-in-law for a wander around the shops so after the obligatory tour of the Ferry Building and a cup of coffee we decided that we’d get a Zipcar for a day and take a trip over the Big Orange Bridge and to Sausilito. After a stinking hot day on Friday when we took an afternoon walk down to Fisherman’s Wharf, Saturday was really foggy and it just didn’t lift all day on that side of town. So other than the occasional glimpse of the bridge I’ll have to go visit it another time.

Sausilito is a small seaside town essentially, a bit like Eastbourne I guess, about 10-15 minutes from the other side of the bridge – you’ve got to make the trip out there, it’s not on the main route. I think it survives entirely off tourists – the guy with his orangey parrot insulting passers by, stores of hideous trinkets, jewellery stores, icecream stores, porta-loos, guy singing to his sausage dog in it’s sunglasses, winding lines of people waiting for the ferry and no good coffee as far as I could work out – didn’t try any!

I think the town has stunning views back to the city but no go when we were there. You could actually see the line in the fog as it moved from one side of the sky to the other. It was a really pleasant couple of hours, and we had great sandwiches from a deli and some delicious cookie dough icecream in lieu of a coffee for afternoon tea.

We had a rather mammoth drive back through San Francisco – we had the car for a day and when coming back into town we managed to get onto this huge triple carriage way through the northern part of the city that had no left turn signs for blocks and blocks and blocks and that of course was the way we wanted to go! It was the first long drive through the city that The Mister had done and all went well – even hill starts – just a bit of confusion at 4-way stops regarding who’s supposed to go first!

Have been for a couple of walks in the morning before work during the last week. Lots of people out running and walking their dogs. It’s quite hard to walk passed the Ferry Building without going in for a coffee! We’ve been told that September and October are beautiful months in San Francisco, that we finally get the summer that other places have already have. And that summer seems to have arrived on schedule – during the last week the temperatures have been in the mid-20’s instead of mid teens as it has been the whole time we’ve been here. And there’s less and less fog around in the mornings and evenings. Here’s how beautiful the waterfront was this morning which opened out to a day that hit 30 degrees! Lucky it was only about 25 when we were walking to and from work.

This weekend we saw one of the seals up reasonably close that lives down at Fisherman’s Wharf that all the tourists flock to see. We wandered further down the waterfront than we have before and came upon a couple of them sitting in the marina – the bigger one was quite bullish and barked at a deck-hand that was squirting him with water – not sure if he was offering him a cooling shower or shoo’ing him off the marina.

Further around we saw the main colony of them – I think the port folks have left all the old pontoons in place to give the seals somewhere of their own to sun bathe rather than having them camp out on people’s boats! Drew quite a crowd that we could see across the inlet.