Concert goodness at Sunset

Geeeek set up an excursion to Sunset Station to see “Faster Pussycat” live, so here I am. The concert isn’t until 8:30 but, as someone said, that seems kind of late to start drinking on a Saturday so Hooters for some wings and beer is in order. I’m frightened. It appears to be revivalist hair metal. Search for Faster Pussycat on the Youtube and you’ll see what we’re getting ourselves into.

Pizza fantastico

Grimaldi’s on Eastern is a really good pizza place. I owe Justin for the recommendation. I don’t know what it is but they have the best cheese I’ve ever had on pizza. It’s awesome. They also have a pretty extensive wine selection. Wine with pizza? Oh yes. I would recommend either their white or (my favorite) their pesto pizza. I had the actual pizza sauce last night and it masked the cheese flavor. Still good but the other ways are better.

So many shoes

I had some underwear shopping to do and, since I had dinner with Ma in front of the mall, that means Dillards. I’m not actually buying shoes but this is what I was walking next to when the alarm went off and it’s an interesting visual picture. I’m worried about what it might do to Matt though.

We made it past security!

We are approaching the end of our long weekend. We had much wine and cheese and chocolate and olive oil. We took many pictures, we drove many miles. We are all ready to go home. I’m just glad we made it through security. I wasn’t sure my cheese would be allowed. We had to ship or check all the wine bottles. The biggest takeaway I haven’t mentioned, should you try a wine country tour yourself, shipping wine is complicated. If you take a big enough bag you can just check it on as luggage on your way back but remember that 1)Wine is really freaking heavy and b)You might not be the best person to pack wine. Luckily there are lots of places in the area that specialize and will ship for you. They’ll even pick it up from your hotel if you want. They definitely know how to pack it better than you do and it’s way cheaper than having the individual wineries ship to you. We didn’t do this and I wish I had. Again, live, learn, going to keep this in mind for the next time…

Ceci n’est pas un Mini Cooper

“This is not a Mini Cooper” would be the direct translation. Margritte had a painting of a pipe with that phrase written below it (replace Mini Cooper with the word Pipe). What he was attempting to say was that this was indeed not a pipe, it was a -picture- of a pipe. This is not a Mini…and, ok, it’s not a picture of a Mini either. That was the joke though. We walked up to get our van and the rental guy (Hi Tony!) said “Mini Van?” and Manduh said “Van? We had a Mini Cooper”. You should have seen the look on his face. He actually locked up for a sec not able to tell if we were joking or not. It was awesome. So for the rest of the weekend our mobile became the Mini Cooper.

We’re on the way to dinner from a whole lot more wine today. Larsen Family Wineries (Hi John!) was, by far, the favorite. We tried 9 wines and both my sibs and myself really liked 8 of them. This didn’t happen on a single wine anywhere else, let alone 8. Also quite good was Benziger who had an absolute must see tour, though I would recommend the tour at the beginning of the trip rather than at the end. It’s a wonderful intro to us noobs. If you aren’t a noob, still check them out because they had a totally sublime Chardonnay as well as a pretty kick-ass Cabernet to boot. Roshambo Winery was also good but a trip to their actual winery versus the tasting room we were at might have been better.

We also did some food tastings today.
Wine Country Chocolates was totally awesome. The Olive Press had some really great olive oils but was a little…much. A little more high falutin’ than we like. The place we just left was the Vella Cheese Company. The tour book said this was a well kept secret and they aren’t kidding. Well worth the stop for cheese fans though. Especially early in the tour because then you can enjoy it back in your hotel room throughout the weekend. Basically we should have swapped our two days I think. Next time we’ll know. And there has to be a next time, we didn’t see Preston of Dry Creek yet…

Naptime

Like many of our trips we stay up too late, get up too early, have fun all day and desperately need a nap before dinner. Which is, unfortunately, right around 6:06. I’ll try to be more awake for the rest of the trip. Today was a bunch of good wineries and we had some out of this world great wines. Hop Kiln, Murphy-Goode and La Crema being the stand outs. Kendel Jackson and Ferrari-Carano were duds. They may have some great wines but their wineries were kind of lame. And Ferrari-Carano made us miss Preston Wineries! According to the tour book this was a grave mistake on our part. Oh well. I guess we’ll have to go back…

Road trip!

Club S and I are waiting for our plane to arrive. I’ve never flown Virgin America before but I gotta say, since our flight was supposed to leave 11 minutes ago and the plane isn’t even here yet…I’m not overly impressed with their on-time record. We’ll see if they can redeem themselves later. My question is this…We’re prepared for Sonoma, but is Sonoma prepared for -us-?