We woke up that cold morning and drove to Mendocino. It was quaint but not as great as Jim from the Napa Inn made it out to be.

We went to this great art/furniture store and bought some gifts. The store had so much cool artistic furniture I just wanted to buy it all up. Theresa bought a hooded sweatshirt because she had been cold the night before. Apparently, they do good sweatshirt sales in Mendocino. Everyone seems to come unprepared.

We continued going north on Route 1 and made our way to Highway 101 to drive through the Avenue of the Giants, a piece of the highway where the giant redwood trees grow.

We eventually ended up in Eureka, the last coast town we were to visit before venturing inland. It was a cute little town and I really wanted to spend more time there but we didn’t have any to spare.

We drove inland towards Weaversville. At one point there was a pickup in front of us with a dog in the cab that kept making a repetitive up, down, and around route along the back. That gave us some respite from the boring drive. We drove down a big chunk of the windy road behind that pickup.

Our camp that night was Pine Grove campground in the Trinity Lake area, which is a part of the Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area. Our site was nice but a bit close to the highway.

We were told that we could only have one night at the site because of Labor Day. Luckily our next door neighbor didn’t show that night so they let us keep the campsite for one more night.

This was our last day in Napa Valley. We went to Safeway to get groceries for our camping trip, then stopped by Copia, where had had an early lunch at Julia’s Kitchen.

The food there was excellent, and they used a lot of vegetables that they grow in their own garden. We walked around in the garden, seeing nut trees and artichoke plants, then took a tour of the place. Although it sounds cheesy, it’s actually a pretty decent place to spend a few hours.

The plan was to head towards the coast and up to Mendocino. We got to Highway 1, which runs right along the edge of the water, and started driving north. The road was very windy and steep, and the coast views were amazing. At one point it seemed that we were above the clouds. We stopped at several scenic views along the way.

That night we found a campground just south of Mendocino. There was a couple there from San Jose that were looking for a campsite for the labor day weekend and said they drove all the way up to the campground without finding one available site. Luckily we only needed the site for one night. The campground was very close to the coast, so it was freezing that night. We bought wood from the owners, but it was damp and the fire never took.

We had planned a balloon ride over Napa Valley, but that meant we had to get up at 5 in the morning. Ouch! When we got in the van, our driver informed us that Napa Valley was too cloud covered so we would launch out of the parallel Winters Valley. I considered saying that we wouldn’t do it, and looking back I should have.

We had to drive about an hour to get there and we missed the sunrise, which was one of the things I was looking forward to. Also, Winters was just a bunch of farms, nothing like the vineyards view we wanted. There were 14 people in our balloon, which was one of the biggest ones made. We got stuck in a traffic jam on the way back to our champagne brunch. The brunch was actually really good.

The first vineyard we went to that day was Stags Leap, where we did a tasting and bought a bottle. Then we came by Pine Ridge, where we wanted to take a tour. Luckily they had some places open (usually they are by reservations only).

We went through their demo vineyard where the guide explained to us how they graft vines that produce the grapes they want onto the vines that withstand the soil type best. Although I have heard of this practice in biology class, I never associated it with grape vines before.

We then went through the bottling plant and the caves where they store their barrels. We tasted one cab and one merlot from the barrel before they were completed (they were about 1 year old). It was very interesting to taste the wine at that point. The wine tasted very different from the wine you normally drink.

Pine Ridge has a “party room” kind of like Truchard did, and that’s where we did our tasting. We tasted the Merlot after it had been bottled and compared to the wine out of the barrel. Also, we had this amazing aged Gouda cheese. I can still remember the flavor of that one. So overall the tour was excellent and very informative. It was so good we even signed up for the “wine of every other month” club.

For lunch we went to the V. Sattui winery. We didn’t do a wine tasting there because it was too crowded and touristy. The lunch was good though, and the winery building is very cool.

Next we hit the Silver Oaks winery, where we tasted some very expensive ($60 and up) Cabernet Sauvignon. This was one of the few wineries at which we didn’t buy a bottle. Actually, I wasn’t that impressed with the wines anyway.

Turnbull Winery was pretty empty. They had a good Sauvignon Blanc that we got a bottle of.

We had dinner that night at Mustard’s Grill. The food wasn’t bad, and we got way too much of it. We had a Turley Old Vine Zinfandel. Zinfandel is another wine variety that I’ll be drinking more of after the Napa Valley experience. I always thought of Zinfandel in terms of White Zinfandel, which I can’t stand. But regular red Zinfandel can be very good and priced reasonably to boot.