After the Sonoma valley, it was off to the Sonoma coast. For us, that was a drive down Rt116 through the Russian River valley, which mixes vineyards, river and giant redwoods. For example, here's a pair of medium-sized trees in the Armstrong Redwoods park. These weren't the biggest trees in the park, by a long shot, but this shot gives a better sense of scale than any of the others we took (Mrs. Cleek took this, of me):

Then, after another 15 minutes of driving, we hit the fog, and then, we reached... the beach:

The water was actually about 30 feet in from of Mrs C.. But, the fog and a little dip in elevation obscured the breaking waves from where I took that shot. Looks better without it, IMO.

A seal was bobbing around in the water, watching us watch it from the beach. He evaded my camera. This guy didn't:

By the way, if you want to know kind of image is the hardest for JPEG to handle, the starfish shot is it - no smooth solid colors, lots of small contrasty details.

There was beach, and there was rock and cliff:

That's quite a change from the NC coast, which is pretty much completely sandy beach, with houses lined-up as far as you can see, right up to the dunes. The little stretch of the Sonoma coast that we saw felt barren by comparison: scattered farm houses with a few vacation cottages here and there.

We did one night at a resort in the little wisp of a town called Bodega Bay, where the Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds, was filmed, and where I somehow managed to get insanely drunk (I'm guessing it was the hot tub, since I really didn't drink much more than anyone else I was with). Yay!

Then the drive back to San Fran, to catch our planes. Here's the church from The Birds, in the town of Tomales:

And, after 8 hours sitting in the SF airport, here's L.A. at night:

That's the moon, up in the corner. Those greasy, plastic airplane windows really suck for taking night shots.

And that's that.

Hooked up with the couple who invited us on the CA trip and headed to Sonoma to see some wineries.

First stop (and it's one of the first winery you meet on the way into the Sonoma region), Gloria Ferrer. What better way to start a gorgeous summer no-work Monday than with some champagne sparkling wine on the patio overlooking the vineyard ?

We got four different glasses and passed them around, and around, and around. Ah... delicious. Bought a couple of bottles for the road.

Then up the road to a much smaller winery, Homewood, where they hooked us up with many delicious samples, and where we ordered many delicious bottles. Homewood, like the majority of the wineries we visited, is very small, and does the majority of their business by selling wines mail-order directly to consumers - they don't distribute to stores at all. I'd never seen that before. I've done wine tours of New York's Finger Lakes and Oregon's Willamette Valley, but you could always find those brands on store shelves somewhere (at least in the local region - I don't see any NY wines here in North Carolina, but they're easy to find in NY). But I didn't know there were vineyards so small that you couldn't find them on any shelf, anywhere - I like that there are.

There are plenty of well-known, mass-market, wineries in Sonoma and even more 20 or so miles east, in Napa, but we stuck to smaller places, mostly. The grapes above were growing across the road from the only huge winery, and the only one I'd even so much as heard of, that we visited while we were there, Coppola - as is Francis Ford Coppola. We've always liked 'his' wines; they're consistently good and inexpensive - and we are, umm, pretty familiar with most of them, so we didn't do a tasting there. But instead, we did a winery tour, drank wine right out of the cask, ate lunch overlooking the vineyards, etc.. Totally fucking idyllic, etc.. Etc.. It was all arranged, and paid, for by a friend in the grocery business. A good time.

This is in the Coppola winery. The casks aren't all Coppola wines, though. Their facility is so big that they handle wines for other people in order to keep the place running at full utilization.

We stayed at a B&B in the town of Sonoma itself: had some fantastic Thai food at a place right off the town square, drank lots of the wine that we'd purchased at the various wineries, wondered why the Town needed to do street work at 7am every day, etc.. Nice place.

Pavement has a great song called "Unfair". It starts like this:

Down from Santa Rosa, over the bay
Across the grapevine to L.A.
We've got deserts, we've got trees
We've got the hills of Beverly
Let's burn the hills of Beverly

And because Santa Rosa is right in the middle of Sonoma county, and we drove through it like four times, and because 'the bay' presumably refers to the San Francisco bay, that song was stuck in my head the entire trip. I do love the song, but I might have worn it out by mentally singing it to myself for eight days straight.

The coast, next...

The first day was spent on jet lag, shopping for cooler clothes, because the weather was gorgeous - warm, clear and sunny, no fog at all for the first 3 days. There was also some general debauchery, including a few stops along the Polk St. Pub Crawl, and ending with a fantastic meal at a place called O'Reilly's Holy Grail, which featured high-end versions of traditional Irish cuisine, among other things (I've got to learn how to make that Guinness and onion lentil stew that was holding up that hunk of halibut I ordered). I don't know if there were any good pictures from that day or not - haven't looked at the camera yet.

But, by coincidence, the next day was the Gay Pride Parade. It started with hundreds of lesbians on motorcycles - or as they call it, Dykes On Bikes:

There were, like I said, hundreds of motorcycles, with women dressed in everything from bridal gowns, tuxedos, and business suits, to traditional biker gear, to French Maid outfits to nothing at all.

That was followed by Mikes On Bikes:

... a bunch of guys all named Mike? I did not verify.

Here's Senator and presidential candidate, Mike Gravel:

I also have a couple pictures of the back of George Takei (a.k.a. Mr. Sulu on the original Star Trek) - sadly, the famous people wanted to look at the other side of the street when they went by me.

We hung out for a couple of hours, watching the zaniness and appreciating the liberal attitude towards drugs enjoyed by both the people and the police in the area. A good time.

Then dinner at a great place called Aqua (thanks, Ugh), which was easily the most sophisticated place at which we'd ever eaten. The food was great, but the presentation was incredible; nearly every dish required one or more waiters to stir, chop, pour or mince one or more components in front of you, and nothing was presented without a full explanation of its composition and preparation. For example, I ordered a tuna tartare appetizer; when it came out, there was a large rectangle of chopped raw tuna (there must've been a pound of tuna there, literally - here's the recipe!) with a yolk from a quail egg on top, and six or seven smaller piles of things like lemon confit, almonds, spices, chopped shallots, etc.. The waiter carefully explained each pile (including the composition of the light dusting of spice around the plate), then carefully mixed it all together for a minute or so. Then he arranged it back into the nice rectangle the tuna started out as. Another waiter mixed my wife's soup ingredients for her at the table - completely unnecessary, but fun, nonetheless. Everything was like that. It sounds fussy, but it was actually very elegant, and absolutely delicious - except the sardine amuses-bouche; I don't like sardines.

I'm 75% convinced that we were seated next to Walter Cronkite. I couldn't hear his voice, to be sure, though.

Next day, we took a trip to the Haight-Ashbury section, the epicenter of the 1960's hippy scene.

It's pretty tame, these days. There are a few t-shirt stores, a few head shops, a good brewpub and bunch of restaurants (we really liked Bia's, and it's cute little back patio area - get the stuffed pepper!). There weren't any flower children, no stoned hippies with guitars, not even much about the events of 40 years ago, outside of the trinket and t-shirt stores. Even the house the Grateful Dead lived in is just another cute (purple) house with no outward indication of its history. I guess I'd be bummed out if it was all a giant tacky Hippie Theme Park, but I thought there'd be a few plaques or historic markers or whatever...? Still, it was a nice place to spend an afternoon.

Then, of course, we had an Alcatraz tour the next day:

That was interesting and kind of creepy.

You know that bit in National Lampoon's European Vacation where they're driving around London, trapped in a traffic circle and they keep passing Big Ben, and Chevy Chase says, each time it goes by, "Look kids, Big Ben! ... There's Parliament!" ? Alcatraz is like that, and the Golden Gate bridge even more so - you see it once and it's exciting, then you see it a thousand more times as you're doing other things, because a lot of the touristy stuff in SF is near them. We must've said "Look Kids, Alcatraz!" a hundred times.

And then, across The Bridge, and off to wine country:

San Francisco is a great city. If we could afford to live there (in the manner in which we are accustomed), we probably would.

Maybe more later...