Recap Of Wine Country Trip

Our trip last week to Wine Country and the Bay Area was a blast. The weather was great, reaching into the 80s on each day we were there. Linda and I had never been to Napa Valley before. In fact, everything we knew about the area we learned from the movie Sideways, which meant that we didn't know anything because that particular movie was filmed in Santa Ynez Valley.

We stayed here, and it was very nice and extremely comfortable. Blade had a deck off of his room, and on both Thursday and Friday afternoons, we all met there to enjoy a bottle of wine with bread, cheese, and chocolate we purchased at Dean and Deluca's.

We visited three wineries on Thursday, two on Friday, and one on our way out of Napa Valley on Saturday morning. The wine tasting highlight of the trip was our Friday afternoon visit to the Hendry Winery in southwestern Napa Valley. We had to get a reservation, but we tasted ten different wines while there, and even got to pour for ourselves. And the wine was great -- our group left with three cases of it.

We enjoyed two excellent dinners while in St. Helena, one at Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen and one at the Culinary Institute of America. I'm looking forward to exploring other regions of Wine Country (e.g., Sonoma Valley and Russian River) on future trips.

On Saturday, we all made our way down to Palo Alto (along with Ray's friend, Julie, who arrived on Saturday morning) to catch Neil Young's Bridge School Concert, which was great. The line-up for the Saturday show was Band of Horses, Cat Power, Death Cab For Cutie, Wilco, Sarah McLachlan, Nora Jones, Jack Johnson, and, of course, Neil Young.

My favorite performances of the evening were Cat Power's cover of Fortunate Son with Neil on guitar and back-up vocals, Death Cab's Soul Meets Body, Wilco's performance of Late Greats (which they did not play when they were in Bend last August and which I had hoped they'd play at Bridge School), Nora Jones' cover of Wilco's Jesus, Etc, and Neil's kick-ass cover of A Day In The Life. I thought that Neil Young played a particularly great set.

Thanks to Amanda and JB for scoring the tickets to this show. And thanks for driving, JB -- we need to do more road trips like this one.