As we left Idaho and entered Montana, we entered magnificent, magnificent forest. It was a forest like nothing I’d ever seen before - a forest right out of a fairy tale. Even the most beautiful forest in California that you see in the Redwoods and their Mammoth Mountain looked nothing like this. The forest was so dense and the snow was so thick and so fluffy that it was just breathtaking. At one point, we stopped to get a photo of the (???) and now entering Montana. I get out of the car with a pair of jeans and a long sleeveless shirt on. We set a tripod, and my wife got me into a position where I fell almost waist-deep into the snow. And I got so cold that I decided that I better get back to the car. As I was walking back to the car, it was freezing so much that I started to wonder if I was even going to make it the 50 ft back to the car.
That day, we rolled into west Yellow Stone. West Yellow Stone is the perfect little tourist town. What makes it different to most tourist towns is that it’s absolutely in the middle of nowhere. It has a nice, even square street with lots of little shops, and lots of little restaurants - most of which are closed in the winter time. We found a fantastic place to stay on tripadvisor.com. It had our own little apartment up above and behind the back of a hotel that had two bedrooms and lots of room. We were very, very happy there.
Unfortunately, the restaurants in Yellow Stone really weren’t that exciting. But I guess we need to consider how difficult it is to get any kind of food in or out of there, in hundreds of miles of snowy icy roads to have to drive the food on. I really shouldn’t complain. Also, the fact that there’s not many people there in the winter time to keep fancy restaurants open. We did find one place that we really loved for breakfast. Again, we got scrambled eggs and hash browns there for breakfast. [And of course, we'd have to work there in the name. (?)]
We also spent New Year’ Eve in west Yellow Stone at the Holiday Inn. It was really quaint, campy(?) and a lot of fun. They brought in a band from Jackson Hall, Wyoming and played a lot of 70s rock and roll music. At first, we just watched and thought it was kind of funny in a small town, but as we started to get more and more in the mood of it, we actually got out on the dance floor and one of the rare moments of our trip, we danced. At first, my wife had worn way too many sweaters and halfway through the first song, I could see that she was already beginning to sweat. She was forced to dance a few dances with me, but we had absolutely magnificent time.
We saw the owner of the restaurant where they were also throwing a big New Year’s Eve party for the town, and you can tell that he was having more fun than anyone else. He was loving the music and he looked like he was re-living a rock concert back in the 70s when he was in junior high school just having the time of his life.
The funny thing, too, is we even ran into people we knew there. We ran into the guy we met at the snow mobile trip, and even the mechanic from the snow mobile shop where we rented the snow mobiles. West Yellow Stone is a very small town. The people were very nice and I felt very privileged to be invited into their little world for New Year’s Eve to have a truly, truly authentic American experience.
Near St. Helena and Rutherford in the Napa Valley is Frog’s Leap Winery. When they gave us directions to get there, they gave us a series of twists and turns and twists and turns that ended with, “Look for the red barn with the weather vane with the frog on top”. As we twisted and turned through the mustard flowers that were woven through the great vineyards, we saw the red barn and sure enough up on top was the frog weather vane. When we walked inside we expected to see a cat sitting on a chair and sure enough, “Where was the cat?” “There was the cat”. The cat had wandered onto the property 13 years previously. The wine tour was free and was absolutely fantastic.
We didn’t learn a whole lot about making wine, but we did learn an awful lot about Frog’s Leap Winery. Some of the greatest things about the tour are that there was absolutely not even the slightest (???) to buy any wine(???). At the end of the tour, they let you try to shoot a basket in the old red barn. If you make the basket, you get a free bottle of wine. Sure enough, out of the 10 people who were on the tour with me, none of us were able to make the basket, although many of us were able to hit the rim. I think part of the trick of it was there was this overhang on the roof and if you try to do a really high shot, you may very well hit the roof instead of making the basket. It is totally a makeable shot though, and I’ll only need to go back and practice more.
On the tour, they told us about the farming methods, which was the part I was most interested and excited about. One thing is that for six months out of the year, there’s no rain where they are and that’s right in the deepest growing season of the grapes. In order to handle this, the vines have had to grow their big stems 15 ft into the soil where there’s a constant supply of water. They’re also very careful that in the spring time they lay down a layer of compost to cover the soil and keep it moist, and then they cut down the mustard flowers to create a pad over the compost. They don’t put any pesticides or herbicides on any of their plants. They’re very careful to do things to attract the right kind of insects and they make the vines as strong as possible so that the pests and diseases don’t attack them. I took a good long walk to the vineyards by myself when I was done and sure enough all the vines are incredibly thick and strong and healthy as if they could survive years of drought.
The entire facility runs almost entirely on solar electricity. They have approximately a thousand solar panels out back that they use to convert the sun’s energy into electricity. During their busiest part of the year, they take about 5% of their electricity from the normal electricity sources and the rest of the time of the year, they’re able to run almost entirely on the solar panels and in fact, sometimes even put extra electricity back into the regular system from their solar panels.
The people there were very, very nice and one of the things I enjoyed the most because I’m not a big drinker is that they had an organic vegetable garden and organic fruit trees, and they don’t mind if you pluck a carrot or a piece of broccoli or tangerine as you walk through the property. One we would’ve expect in today’s world for tour like that would cost a lot of money or at least with a heavy sales pitch at the end to try to get you to buy wine, but there was nothing of the sort and it was an incredibly a leisurely beautiful experience. The tour took about an hour and they took us into my favorite room which is the room where they stored all the oak barrels and we got some great photos with hundreds of oak barrels in the background.
The El Dorado Hotel looks like it’s probably close to 100 years old and has a gorgeous little restaurant inside and a beautiful little coffee shop. The restaurant looks like it serves food at least until 10 o’clock. There’s also a bar downtown called Steiners. Steiners says it was established 1927 and when you look inside the bars going even late at night, it looks like somewhere that’s been running continuously since 1927. There’s also a movie theater downtown that looks like it comes out of a movie. It was also built in the 1920s or the 1930s. It reminds me of the type of movie theaters I used to go to when I was a kid. There’s only one movie playing at any time. There’s also a cute pizza place that was open until 10pm and a few other bars and a Ben & Jerry’s.
On the Sonoma Square is also an adorable restaurant called The Girl & the Fig. We’ve been meaning to eat there for awhile and maybe, we’ll still get there this weekend. It looks like it probably doesn’t seat more than 20 or 30 diners in one half and another 20 people can be seated on the bar on the other side, and it gives off a warm glow o a winter’s night. There’s another bar that’s open at a place called the Swiss Hotel and there’s also a pizza place called Mary’s Pizza. There have a big sign out front showing they also sell cocktails. There’s a place called the Sonoma Cheese Factory that’s been manufacturing cheese that looks like it’s close to 100 years also.
The movie theatre as we just drove by it again is called the Sebastiani Theater. There’s also a hotel called the Ledson Hotel which looks like it simply has a restaurant and bar in it and no longer is an actual hotel. It’s one of the most beautiful buildings on the Sonoma Square.
The city hall of Sonoma which sits in the center of the square is also another gorgeous building, kinda reminds me of the movie “Back to the Future”. On the corner of 2nd Street West and Napa, just a little bit off of the main square, I also passed one of my favorite places in the world, The Black Bear Diner. I’ve literally driven hundreds of miles out of my way to get to eat at one before. Right next to The Black Bear Diner we also spotted a (???). It closes earlier than the ones in other parts of the country and at 9:30pm, it was already shut down.
After we left Yellow Stone, we drove south and ended up in Salt Lake City to visit an old friend. We arrived in the evening just in time to have dinner at one of their highest rated restaurants in (???) where we went for sushi. The downtown was much hipper than we had expected and when we walked into the restaurant it was full of the tattooed and dyed-hair crowd. It was an incredibly hip restaurant with a lot of very hip people and had edgy-artsy feel to it. Not in any way dangerous but the very fun and very interesting. The food was very creative and I thought fantastic. There were a few items there that were very unique unlike anything I’d ever had before and again the quality of sushi was amazing especially considering that we were so far from the ocean.
What surprised my wife was the fact that she wasn’t expecting alcohol to be served because it was such a Mormon town. Everybody in the restaurant, on the other hand, was drinking and there were plenty of people drinking at the bar. We checked into the Marriott Hotel downtown which is near Temple Square, one of the main Mormon centers.
When we walked into the hotel, it felt much more like the Salt Lake City I was expecting. The people who worked at the front desk and the guy who took our bags up to our room were incredibly clean-cut looking people, very nice, very polite and extra honest - at least that’s how they felt. The Marriott by the way had just been renovated. They clearly spent millions of dollars on it and our room was absolutely heaven. Most of the places we’d stayed in in the snowy areas had had some set of static blankets where you were constantly being shocked. The Marriott on the other hand had absolutely phenomenal blankets, and phenomenal beds. It was an absolute luxury for people to get to stay there and I didn’t want to get out.
The next day, we went to see my friend, who lives in the southern part of Salt Lake City at the mouth of one of many canyons. The canyon had been taken up by the people who lived in the areas that are on private projects. There was a lot of volunteer work that went on making sure the canyon was well taken care of. The pads were maintained, branches were cleared and it was absolutely beautiful. There’s a lot of mountain biking, country skiing, a lot of hiking, a lot of jogging - incredibly active community. It appears that each one of the canyons that goes up in the hills had some little community at the base and at least this one, the families and the people of the community were very heavily involved in the canyon.
We’re very proud of this canyon and we enjoyed seeing all the different parts of it very much. In fact, we even had the chance to climb into the first igloo we’ve ever been in our lives. So, it turns out as we studied up a bit more on Salt Lake City, there’s actually now less than half the population of Salt Lake City is Mormon, but there is still a very strong Mormon influence. We had a really, really wonderful time and I’d actually like to spend a lot more time going back and exploring it more.
For lunch today, we stopped at Nick’s Cove, which is south. If you go from Sonoma, and you go to the ocean and go south just a little bit, you’ll get it. We went there because last night, we had dinner at the Martini House, and we wanted to try another one of Pat Kuleto’s restaurants.
This one I read about. It was supposed to look like an authentic 1930’s seafood restaurant on the coast and sure enough it turned out it to be one. It was a 1930’s restaurant that has been on the coast and had been there for forever. It had eventually been abandoned until Pat Kuleto came in, redid the place and made it spectacular. It looked just the way you expect a cool, funky seafood place to look like on the coast.
One of the things that was really exceptional was that afterward there was a long dock that went out to a little boathouse that looked like a place where you can rent boats or possibly, just a dock for people to land on. What they’ve done is they’ve taken this little boathouse at the end of the dock, made it really cool inside with all kinds of ocean artifacts, had a little table set up and even have a phone in there so that if you do happen to wander out there, you can order food from the kitchen and have it delivered to you.
My wife thought the food was just okay. She ordered some (???), but she thought that it was overdone and too crispy. I, on the other hand, had a cioppino(?) that was unbelievable and I also ordered some oysters which were fantastic. I also ordered a sushi rolled with local (???) crab which was pretty good too.
Overall, we didn’t realize that with all the restaurants it was getting harder and harder to walk out of a very good restaurant for under $100. And we realized that in today’s economy a lot of these restaurants are going to start having trouble filling up. On the other hand, all of the restaurants I’ve been mentioning lately have been full of people so it just goes to show that if you’re first class that do better than everybody else, even if the place was a little bit pricey, you’d still be able to fill the place up with customers.
The atmosphere at the place was unbelievable. The location where it was poised was unbelievable and in fact, they have taken some old cottages that were down the way on the water and renovated them into hotel rooms. I can only imagine how beautiful they must have been inside. As we drove by them, we realized one of them was actually a boat that looked as if it was dried out for repairs and they painted it up and made it really cute. They were using that as one of the hotel rooms. The hotel rooms, they told me, were in the $200-$500/night range.
After we left Vegas, as we were driving north on 15th through Utah, we had a couple of interesting experiences. The first of which I mentioned already, when it started to snow really hard, and I got really scared because I didn’t know how to drive on the snow or ice.
We stopped so my wife can get some tea. The funny thing was the water had so much chlorine in it that when she drank the tea, she can barely taste the tea, and all that she could really notice was the chlorine.
After driving through the snow and the icy roads for part of the day and into the night, we were on highway 70. Before we did the big drive across the vast deserted area toward Colorado, I thought we would be better off to spend the night, and I’m sure glad we did. We stayed at a Hampton Inn, a place I’ve grown very, very fond of. The Hampton Inn, at least the newer ones, laid out furniture identical to every other one, and they’re very, very comfortable. They had a washer and dryer that we were able to use to get our clothes clean a couple of days into the trip, which was really nice. We also had a nice room with a TV set up, so we were able to stop, sit, have some snacks and play chess. They have a lot of food that they put out for breakfast in the morning. Luckily, I found their little refrigerator and someone had left the lock open, so I was able to sneak in and find some snacks to have that night, too. So, we sat, played chess and had our little snacks while the clothes washed knowing that it was freezing cold and with (horizontal?) snow blowing outside.
The other thing that I almost left out in this story was about a half hour before we got to the Hampton Inn, I was quite tired and as I’ve said, a little stressed and scared from the day’s drive. We stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. We put the gas pump in, pumped in the gas and then, when the time came to leave, I hopped in the car and took off. I had neglected to take the pump out of the gas tank. Luckily, with the way they are now designed, the gas pump simply broke away on a small plastic joint, and the pump automatically shuts off. This is one time where I think technology and safety features really proved themselves to work well. Being the honest guy that I am, I went back into the gas station and told them what I had done. The woman said, “Don’t worry about it. Give me your name, address and phone number.” I, then, got a call from the guy a little while later and it all costs $25 to replace it. It took me awhile to pay them back so I’m going to send them an extra $5.
We took off in Yellow Stone and again, I was a bit timid about the whole thing. I told the guide that I probably wanted to just go in and ride around a half hour and come back. I couldn’t imagine riding around the park for 6-8 hours. The idea made me nervous and made me feel like we’re going to get stuck out in the middle of nowhere.
Once I took off from the snow mobile and started to get the hang of it, my bravery shot up higher and higher. The amazing thing was we were blessed with the best weather our entire trip. One of the worst snow storms in the area in years had just passed through leaving a beautiful blanket of snow on everything. In fact, a week before, the entire park hadn’t even opened to snow mobiles yet because there was no snow. The only way to get into the park was on a snow mobile or on these funny snow coaches. Snow mobiling was definitely the way to go.
As we entered the park, you go along this straight street toward the central loop. There’s a big loop that runs around the middle of the park. We quickly found ourselves riding along the edge of a river, looking for eagles that sit on the trees and hunt in the water. We never saw an eagle, but we did see a huge nest that looks like it must be an eagle’s nest.
I was shocked looking in the water to see these white objects that first, I thought were snow and then, we realized they were actually swans. Most of the rivers of Yellow Stone are heated by the geothermal features from the hot lava deep down under the ground that comes up a little closer to the surface in Yellow Stone. In fact, all of Yellow Stone Park is actually in the mouth of a volcano. So, the rivers are able to stay warm enough that the swans can spend their winters there without having to migrate anywhere else.
As we drove along the river at one point, we noticed a herd of elk that was across the river, and we stopped and watched them for awhile. And as we continued on the road, we saw a bison here and a bison there. In fact, if we’ve gone to where I was originally going to go to turn around and head back, I wouldn’t have seen anything but a couple of elk. As we headed on, we saw more and more bison, and then we started to get to, what they call the geothermal features. These are places where the hot rocks heated by the lava interact with the water and cause things, like hot bubbling boiling water, hot pots of boiling colored mud, or places where gases come from deep within the earth and come out. All of it against the snowy white background was absolutely breathtaking.
We made it to (???) and the funny thing was the first time we saw an old (???) it really didn’t show much than a lot of speed. We stopped and had lunch at Old Faithful Inn(?) and then, when we came back out, we just happened to turn and look back at the right moment to see a beautiful display of water shooting up from underneath the earth.
On the way back, when I realized that the adventure was ending, I really wanted to stop and take in everything we saw. And then, we started to see more bison up on the road ahead. So, I signaled to our guy, and we slowed down and stopped on the side of the road to admire this bison standing on the road. As soon as we did, another bison jumped up very close in front of us. I started to approach the bison so I could get a good picture standing next to it, but the guide saw that the bison actually had a baby bison with it and quickly motioned me away before I got rammed by it. Luckily, the guide was more worried about the whole event than the bison was. We did manage to stop and get a great photo of me and my wife with a couple of the bison very close behind us. The only problem was this single pole that was sticking up on the side of the road that got in the way of a perfect picture, but in the end it’s the Photoshop that helped. As soon as the first and second bison jumped up on the road, there had been another and another, until in the end, there were probably 20-30 bison completely blocking the road.
Now, we were stuck. We were on our snow mobiles, and there were other people with snow coaches and snow mobiles coming up on the road, and they were stuck too. We all just sat there in the snow in Yellow Stone Park in the middle of traffic in the winter time where we’re all in our snow mobiles and snow coaches being blocked by a herd of bison blocking the road. Once they were on the road, there was really nothing we can do about it, so we just simply rode by and stayed behind the bison going at a slow pace while they took their own leisurely route. The guide said that in the summer time the bison tend to stay off the roads than in the winter time because the snow is more compact and bison found the road a much easier way to move from one park to another. So, don’t be surprised to see a bison or two actually on the road.
It was an incredible experience to see a wild animal, especially a wild animal that so symbolizes America, roaming free and roaming free just a few feet ahead of your hundred horse power snow mobile. An amazing thing was the bison were not even the slightest bit afraid of the people or the snow mobiles, and had absolutely no fear of being hunted, which I’m sure is due to the fact that hunting is completely prohibited in the park. In a park like this, there are other great wild animals, like wolves and grizzly bears, which is my favorite. We didn’t run into any of the wolves, and the grizzly bears are all hibernating so you don’t see them in the winter time.
The next day, New Year’s Day, though, we went to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, which is right near the entrance of the park. We imagined the entrance to be something a little Disney-like, but what happened is when you walk in the front door and through a small area, you’d find that most of the display is outside. We walked out the back door and found ourselves in a snow-covered area.
The next thing I saw were wolves that were looking right at us with nothing between us and the wolves but snow. It was pretty frightening. As we got closer we realized that there was actually a trough that the wolves couldn’t get across to get to us, but they still looked awfully strong and awfully agile that we wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them could’ve leapt over the ditch and had gotten to the snow where we were.
What was really funny was there’s a warming hut in between the two packs of wolves that are at the discovery center. Each pack has quite a bit of land to itself. They brought each of the packs of wolves into its own area, then, built the discovery and the warming hut in between the two areas. The guy talked about the first day they opened it up and the two packs of wolves walked into the windows and stared into each other for hours barking and looking and staring and barking and looking. This is because as far as each pack of wolves knew, they were the only pack of wolves in the world. And now here they were, 20 ft away from another pack of wolves with nothing between the two but a few panes of glass and some tourists.
After looking at the wolves for awhile, I turned around to realize that 30 ft away, with nothing between me and it, was a 12-14 ft high grizzly bear. This was the terrifying moment of the entire trip. I actually thought there was a grizzly bear that was going to strike us that I felt my heart stop. As we walked closer to the grizzly bears, it still wasn’t completely apparent what separated the grizzly bears from us and them. In fact, as you got closer you realize that there was a 3 ft tall fence between us and the 14 ft high grizzly bear. There must have been, on the other side of the fence, a large ditch that was filled with snow that the bears knew about and couldn’t walk across, because as far as I could tell, there was nothing preventing the bears from coming and devouring us and the rest of the tourists there.
We were able to get lots of great photos with the bears standing and playing behind us while other tourists took our pictures. Again, it was an amazing experience to have that instead of being in a nice cozy museum, we’re standing outside where it’s slightly below to slightly above 0 and it’s actually a situation that can be potentially dangerous because you could freeze to death while you’re looking at the animals.
It was beautiful and wonderful, and the bears were absolutely magnificent-looking. It really made me want to go back to Montana again in the spring time. In fact, I’m still bugging my wife to see if she’s willing to go with me so we could take a trip up there this spring to do a little fly fishing as well as to watch the bears as they’re coming out of hibernation.
The funny thing about the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, if I understood it properly, is that it’s actually a bit of a bear jail. My wife informed me that the bears that were there have been abandoned as cubs, because the parents have been killed by hunters or from some other means. My theory was that a lot of the bears there were troublemakers who got too accustomed to grab a picnic basket Yogi-Bear-style, and wandering into town. We still don’t know why those wolves happen to be there but the bears were there either because they were homeless orphans or because they were troublemakers that had to go to bear jail.
Driving through Menlo Park coming back from Facebook, I had the fortunate circumstance that I got a flat tire. I pulled over in the nearest parking lot and when I stopped the car I was astounded when I saw these new cars there called Tesla. I went inside to ask if it was okay for me to leave my car there while I was waiting for the repair guy and I ran across the street to grab some sushi. What I saw inside were the most amazing electric cars you’ve ever seen. They’re manufactured in conjunction with Lotus and they have a 250 mile range on the charge. They’re all electric – the batteries weighing 900 lbs. That keeps the cars weighted down. Instead of having a front engine with all the weight in the front of the car, the batteries are dead center and keeping the center of gravity really distributed around the wheels. You just look at the thing and you can see how fast it’s going to go. The car’s made entirely of carbon fiber and every piece of it feels like it weighs like a feather. I can only imagine how amazing one of these is to drive. If I end up helping any of you and you become multimillionaires as a result of my connections or advice, feel free to send me one of these. I just love them. They’re 109,000$. In fact, you can pick me up two.
Actually driving the snow mobile was a whole new experience for me. I’ve driven a lot of different kinds of vehicles in my life and then practically every sport on the planet - definitely every sport that involves the board.
I didn’t know what happens when you turn a snow mobile. Does it slide out in the back like a jet ski does, or does it track like a motorcycle does on the street? It turned out that they have an incredible amount of traction, but for an item that is being driven on the loose snow and ice, it turns out that it has two blades on the front that looked like skis, which are probably the most slippery part of the whole thing, and then at the back of the tractor, like you’d see on a caterpillar tractor truck, it has an incredible amount of gripping. If you turn it really sharp, you can get the front to slide a little bit, but you have to turn really hard to get them to slide at all. I did do that quite a few times until the guide told me that the rangers will write me a ticket if I kept doing it.
To make the snow mobile go is really simple. You turn the key to get the snow mobile to start, which started very easily, and then, you have a single thumb control, which made the snow mobile go fast or slower. The advantage of this is that if the snow mobile took off and you flew back off the handlebars, you would no longer be pushing on the thumb, and it would turn off. This is different from the old motorcycle ones where you pushed your hand backwards to make it go, because then sometimes when you took off at speed, it would accelerates, and you’d just go faster and faster.
The nice surprise for both of us is that there were seat warmers, hand warmers and even thumb warmers on the snow mobile. And as we turned and cranked them up at the highest setting, I, amazingly, felt my hands and thumb getting too hot after awhile.
The only thing I didn’t like about them, even though they were brand new Yamaha snow mobiles, was the fact that it took a lot of pressure to push on the thumb control to accelerate the snow mobile. We were out and about for about 6-8 hours and by the time we were an hour into it, my thumb was already getting exhausted and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to push the thing the whole trip. If we had done the “big loop”, which I’d like to do next time and is about a 120 miles, I honestly don’t know how long my thumb would be able to last. It was kind of strange that the hardest thing to do when driving a snow mobile was actually the pushing with your thumb.
We also found it incredibly fun to ride standing up. You get a whole new perspective of the world, and I’m sure it’s much more dangerous that way. But, especially on the way back, I found myself riding the snow mobile standing up with my feet on the two platforms on either side of the seat with the face mask up, and the freezing wind blowing in my face.
The snow mobile also has a nice built-in basket in the back so bring a couple of bungee cords along so you can throw your extra jackets, food and any other things you want to take with you in the back and bungee cord them down. My items stayed in place really well with 2-3 bungee cords that I had with it. The guide also had a big wilderness style backpack that you use to go mountaineering. His was bungee corded in and it stayed in place the whole time.
It would’ve been very comfortable to have 2 people on the snow mobile also, but when you consider the fact that you spent so many thousands of dollars just to get to Yellow Stone, I predict that anyone who’s old enough to ride one will enjoy riding their own snow mobile, and even a 60-70 year old adult would have no trouble riding the snow mobile, provided they went slow enough that they maintain control of the snow mobile.
The only thing that was difficult on them was that there were ruts on the road. There had been many different vehicles, including snow mobiles and these funny snow coaches (which were cars and trucks with these tractor-wheels on them as well as these skis in the front), and all these vehicles would build ruts on the road so when you’re riding your snow mobile, your skis on the front of the snow mobile would give (???) and you would actually, for the most part, lose your ability to steer. Most of the time, the snow mobiles just follow these ruts. If you put a little pressure on, you could hop out of one rut into the next. But most of the time, you’re simply following the path that have been worn in by many people before you.
My wife complained many times because she followed me the majority of the time, and our guide had taught us a series of hand signals that I wasn’t able to memorize. During the time he was teaching us the hand signals, I was becoming oriented to how the whole thing was set up and how it worked, so I pretty much missed the hand signals. A couple of times when I would see an end, I’d come to a quick stop and throw a hand signal back, but I guess I threw the wrong one and she almost ran into me twice because she didn’t realize I was stopping. I still think she just may not have known how to operate the break properly, but she claims that I’m absolutely wrong on this. I’d teach you what the hand signals are, but honestly to this day, I still can’t remember what they were and I never actually learned them in the first place.
Meadowood Grill
For Valentine’s Day, we ate at the Meadowood Grill near St. Helena. It’s in the Meadowood Resort. The Meadowood Resort is the peak of what one could create if one were trying to create the most wonderful rustic(?) setting possible. The Meadowood Resort is spread out over some winding hills on the edge of Napa Valley.
We made reservations in advance for breakfast. When we went in, the place was not particularly fancy, but everything was clean and everything was perfect. You look out over the golf course and the croquet garden. The food we got was magnificent. My wife got the omelets. You get to pick the ingredients of the omelets and in fact, she ordered the ham and the bacon on the side so I could have it. I got the corned beef hash, which was quite good, but probably not quite as good as what she got. They gave us some unbelievably toasted French bread with jam and butter. One of the jams was strawberry and the other was an orange marmalade. With my meal, they also gave me a bran English muffin. We got fresh squeezed juice. I had fresh squeezed pineapple juice, which I haven’t had in over 20 years, and my wife got fresh squeezed grapefruit juice. She also got a latte, which she said was wonderful and actually looked incredibly beautiful with the way they swirled the foam. I also got a hot black tea with it.
Breakfast for the two of us came to around $72. We realized that about $25 of it were drinks so if we had avoided the drinks, and included the tip on it, it would’ve dropped it down to about $40. We can’t afford to stay in the hotel, which I think is between $500-$1000/night, but with $70 we were able to enjoy the hotel just as if we’d stayed there ourselves.
After breakfast, we went on a hike, one that I thought was going to be a leisurely walk around the grounds. They have over 4 miles of trails that circle around the hotel. Once we got started, it went almost immediately uphill, and I was huffing and puffing and barely able to keep up with my wife, who, in these days, was in a much better shape than I am. They made it more adventurous because they had signs at the base warning you about mountain lions and about rattlesnakes, and what to do in the unlikely case of a rattlesnake bite. We also noticed that we were the only ones on the trail, and we didn’t pass anyone else. So, I have a sneaking suspicion that the type of people who stayed at the hotel that was $500-$1000/night aren’t the kind of people that normally do steep hiking trails like this. The place was magnificent, and if you had the money to stay there it would have really been wonderful, but if you can’t, for $40-$70, you can definitely enjoy a very, very memorable breakfast.
