The next morning we had an awesome breakfast with some good company. Turns out another couple was also in from NJ.

Our first order of business was to go to the Truchard vineyards for a 10AM tour. We met with one of the owners, Joanne Truchard. We tasted two wines, including a white wine, Roussanne, which I’ve never had before. Then we walked around the vineyards and up to the spot used as a model for their label.

The artist that created the label actually took soil and stone from the hillside and crushed them up to get their color. These colors were used on the wine labels.

We went into the cool storing caves and saw all the barrels there. In the back of the cave was a large party room, which would be a nice place to hold a dinner party.

Since Truchard is in the Carneros region, our next stop was Domaine Carneros. It’s a large building modeled after a French mansion owned by Taittinger, the French company that owns Domaine Carneros. Domaine Carneros is known mainly for their sparkling wines. Oh, it would be called champagne, but then the French will sue. We had a sparkling wine tasting with cheese.

The cheese was probably too much because we had a lunch reservation at Domaine Chandon, a vineyard also known for their sparkling wines. At lunch we shared a lobster appetizer, which was awesome, and had paca paca and salmon for entrees. Both were excellent. We had a half-bottle of Pine Ridge Dijon Clones Chardonnay with our meal. We liked the wine a lot, and decided to go to the vineyard. After this meal, we were pretty much champagned-out for the rest of the trip.

After Domaine Carneros we drove across to the Silverado Trail, a road that parallels Rt 29 through Napa Valley. We stopped by at S. Anderson in the Stags Leap area. I tasted some reds and bought a Claret. One good thing about going to Napa Valley was that we experienced many different kinds of wines other than the regular merlot, cabernet, etc.

Dinner that night was at the Martini House in St. Helena, a town that I regret not spending more time in. We had a great seat outside on the patio. When we were deciding about our appetizers, the waiter told us about a mushroom soup that is “life changing.” So Theresa got it and it actually was pretty damn good.

It was quite a night. There were two drunk ladies, who I believed were mother and daughter, at a table next to us hitting on everyone who worked there. Then when they left, we heard them saying that they wanted to go to a bar in town. Our waiter followed them and we later heard that he drove them home. Also, at a table next to us there was a group of about 5 people who had 5 bottles of wine for their table. They were saying things like “the nose on this gets so much better over time.”

On Sunday, we had our last half day in San Francisco. We drove to Golden Gate park, and up the cliffs by Cliff House and Seal Rock. We had breakfast on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Down the hill by the restaurant were the remnants of an old bathhouse, and a tunnel leading to a small inlet on the other side.

On the way out of the city, we stopped at Vista Point, and saw the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge very clearly (no fog at all!). Then we took Highway 101 North to Sausalito. We had a (surprisingly) good lunch right on the water, and walked around. Sausalito is a quaint little place with lots of little independent shops.

After a few hours, we resumed our journey to Napa. On the way we stopped at a Wal-Mart to pick up some camping supplies for our future outings. We didn’t bring a cooler with us to conserve space and were thinking of getting a styrofoam one when we got to Cali. However, Wal-Mart had a cooler on sale for $13, so we bought it. It’s amazing what you can get there for so little money.

We arrived at the Napa Inn, where stayed for 3 nights. The parlor and breakfast rooms were very nicely decorated. We stayed in the Oak room, where we had a small window seat overlooking the street. We chatted up one of the owners, Jim, who told us “you gotta go to Mendo” a million times. He was talking about Mendocino, a small town on the ocean that was on our itinerary.

Our dinner that night was at La Toque, an expensive French place in Rutherford. We opted for the 5 course tasting menu with wine pairing. The service was good but the wine and food was so not worth the money. We finished dinner outside on the patio next to a cool huge stone fireplace. Overall it was disappointing because of the quality of the food, but the fireplace at least made up for it a tiny tiny bit.

The next morning we took a walking tour around the city, mostly going by the AAA book’s “walking tour” guide. We went up two very steep hills at first and Theresa was having some trouble, but it turned out to be good preparation for our camping trip. From the top of the streets we could see the Golden Gate Bridge surrounded by fog. The view from the top of the streets was awesome.

We took a trolley, which we of course had to do while we in San Francisco. Then we walked around Chinatown, Nob Hill, and up to Telegraph Hill where we saw (but didn’t go up into) the Coit Tower.

We walked down to Fisherman’s Wharf, and had lunch at an overly expensive crowded restaurant. I would definitely not recommend eating lunch on Taylor Street.

On pier 39, there are sea lions that were lounging around on the docks. They have been there ever since the big earthquake in 1989. Theresa took a lot (too many if you ask me) pictures of them.

We walked over to Ghirardelli square, hoping to get some chocolate, but the lines were way too long, so we had to make do with a milk chocolate sample at the Ghirardelli store.

After eating our chocolate, we walked up more super-steep hills and came to the top of twisty Lombard Street. I would hate to have an apartment on that street, since there was a constant stream of cars going down. We walked back to the hotel and rested before dinner.

To get to dinner we took a bus and then a trolley (as per Monty’s good instructions) to the Embarcadero for dinner at Boulevard. The weather that night was very cold and wet. Dinner was good, but we thought it was overpriced. The highlight of the meal was the excellent fois gras.

Theresa complained about the cold on the way home so we ended up taking a cab back.

We flew into San Francisco International. There was some weird guy on the tram telling us how San Francisco is the best airport in the world. Whatever. We went to get our rental car, and the guy told us to pick from any number of cars in a certain aisle (the SUV lane).

We chose a beige-ish Suzuki XL_7. When we got inside we were very disappointed to see that it had a CD player not a tape deck. This was bad because we had brought an iPod (with tape adaptor) to listen to music on. D’oh!

We drove from the airport to our hotel, the Pacific Heights Inn. It was a little motel in a great location. Monty, one of the people that worked there, was awesome. He always had good advice and even better jokes.

The only problem we had was that there was no A/C. When we got there we realized that we hadn’t checked for it beforehand. However, it wasn’t too bad since we had a big fan and at night it was cooler anyway.

That night we went down Union Street to grab a bite to eat and check out the local scene. What we saw were lots of furniture stores, and someone riding down the street showing off their Segway.

In June/July of 2003, we went on a trip to Northern California. The plan was to fly into San Francisco and stay there for a few days, then drive up to Napa Valley for a few days. After that we went camping for a week and half at a few Northern Cali State/National Parks.

Packing for this trip took a while because we had to get all of our gear together for camping. But we had fun.