Mid-Week Warriors

I stumbled upon this site while reading a blog and found this picture quite funny. So funny that I called Grant over to see it. This joke has kept with us for over a week now so I thought I would share it with you. This joke followed us to Sonoma Valley this week.

For those of you not familiar with California geography, I live in Alameda County (home of cities like Berkeley and Oakland). Across the bay, to the west, is San Francisco County. Just to the north of SF, over the Golden Gate Bridge is Marin County, where there are crazy amounts of breast cancer. Then just north of that is Sonoma County. To the east of Sonoma is the more well known Napa County, but we don't go there because it's a little too "touristy".

The highlights of the trip for me were our visits to Gloria Ferrer Champagne Caves and Sonoma Coast State Beach.

We have visited this winery twice before, once with Grant’s parents and once with two friends of Grant from his time in India. We visited this winery first on our trip north through the valley on Tuesday. We rolled in around 11:30am and decided that this would be our lunch spot. Gloria Ferrer doesn’t do “tasting” for their champagnes. So you either buy it by the glass or bottle. Usually we get a bottle, but since it was just the two of us, we opted for glasses. Grant got the Royal Curve and I got the Rose Brut. This was the best lunch that we have shared in quite a while. We were both so relieved to be out of the city. We haven’t been under too much stress, unless you think the act of figuring out how to best fill your time while on summer break as stressful. Still, it was so nice to be on a mission, checking off another summer goal on my list.

On the second day of our trip, we drove about an hour west from the valley to the ocean and spent the next two days wandering along the coast taking pictures with our twin cameras (that’s a good topic for another post, maybe I tell you tomorrow). It is so strange the feelings that arise when I am by the ocean. I didn’t necessarily want to go in it, in fact most of the beaches in Northern California are not really safe for swimming. But, like snow, the ocean just seems to be a place I need to go every now and then to remind me how life is like outside my city boundaries.

No matter how much fun I have on these trips, by the last day, I’m always ready to come back home. As we were crossing the Richmond Bridge (across the northern part of the bay) about 25 minutes from Oakland, I found myself signing to myself, “oh I want to be back in my city by the bay, whoa, oh, ohhhh.” Who can name that reference?

More picture of the trip can be found here.