Summer Travel Map

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

From one "wine country" to the next

October 27, 2010
Buellton, CA

We've closed out our tour of Napa Valley and moved south to Santa Barbara County's "Wine Country" for a few days.

Last Saturday and Sunday were plagued with heavy rain. Geri joked that Napa Valley was sad to see Pat and Al go home to Connecticut. If that's the case, "sad" doesn't begin to describe it. We had almost 2" of rain, bad for us and worse for the grapes still hanging on the vines.

Needless to say, we took advantage of the rainy weather to do, well, not much. Geri did some laundry. We (I) watched some sports on TV. I pulled together a pretty good Pork Tenderloin with Pan-roasted Potatoes, and made a hearty Bolognese-style sauce that went well with Penne. We did some rearranging on the wine storage front (OK, some of that "rearranging" involved bottle recycling). I did some cleanup after we had a minor water leak due to the pulled fabric on the slide "toppers"; this is high on my list of "fix it over the winter" projects.

Things cleared up on Monday. We made a Whole Foods run and Geri went off to shop at Napa Style. We had dinner at Gott's Roadside (formerly Taylor's Automatic Refresher), the only burger joint we've run across with a nice wine list. We had a little excitement at dinner, not the culinary kind, though. As we were chatting with the couple behind us (as we often do), the wife started to choke. Initially thinking she'd gotten into something hot, we all became alarmed when her color started to change. The husband did a quick impromptu Heimlich and a recently-trained vacationing EMT provided advice. A restaurant employee called 911 and the firefighter/EMT crew arrived in short order. Fortunately, the Heimlich and some hot water dislodged the obstruction and soon everyone was calm. We hung around and chatted through a couple of bottles of Cabernet, and headed home later than we'd expected.

Yesterday was our travel day and we were up early since we didn't do our normal night-before preparations. We were on the road on schedule, though, leaving Napa right around 9:00 AM. South on Highway 29, a quick jog on CA-37 to Vallejo, I-80 to Oakland, I-880 to San Jose, and we were soon back on US-101. We made a quick stop in Salinas to drop off a package for Wayne and Eva and wrapped up the driving day a little after 3:00 PM, pulling into Flying Flags RV Resort in Buellton.

We'd just gotten set up when the check-in person from the office came over and asked us to move sites. Apparently, they've got some digging and wiring to do, and we were inadvertently parked in a site that'll be impacted. So, dish down, slides in, water-sewer-electric disconnected and we moved 125' to a different row. Hopefully, we'll be settled here for the rest of our stay. We ordered a pizza for dinner since neither of us felt like cooking, even leftovers. It married well with a nice Napa Zinfandel.

Today, we'll spend the morning going over "back home" things. I've got to call to activate the cable Internet and Geri's got to confirm various medical appointments that are set up starting at 7:30 AM Monday morning. Oof-da; back to the alarm clock! I'll update my navigation map for the last leg of this summer's "vacation", as we'll probably head directly to Phoenix from here on Saturday.

This afternoon, we'll probably head to Lompoc to visit Geri's sister. We'll spend the rest of our time here picking up "wine club" shipments that we've had held for us. It's tough work, but someone has to do it...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It will be nice to get back to Arizona won't it?