Road Trip v.2 (Part 3): Redwoods and Wine Country

Alarmed at what's going to crawl out
onto me from this massive
Redwood root structure (Best viewed
if you click on thumbnail)

I'm ashamed to admit it. I had never been to California before. It was the only state on the trip that I had never set foot in (airports don't count). Cave Junction, Oregon was only 40 minutes to the border, and when we reached the welcome to California sign, I was exceptionally excited. By the end of our stay in California it blew my mind to think we had started at the tippy top of highway 101 somewhere around exit 600-something for the redwoods, and by the end of the week we were down by San Diego where I believe I took exit 27 to get to the zoo. My first visit to California was total domination of the state. Now I only have six more states to knock off the list (Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Alaska).

We almost immediately hit some fairly impressive redwoods on the windy, aptly named Redwood Highway. Being a pair of fools, and only able to research so much when planning a three-week-long road trip, we had no idea where to stop. We sort of figured there was one centralized Redwood Forest park. So we mostly oohed and ahhed at all the redwood from the car, bypassing all the state parks. Finally we got to the national visitor center for the Redwood Forest past Orick. Like a couple of children, we were confused why there had not been any obvious signs that said "Yo! Redwoods this way!" So we asked the kind park ranger, hey, where do we go to pull off and see some sweet redwoods? He assumed we were coming from the south because what idiots would drive down through almost the entirety of the redwoods and stop to ask such a harebrained question. We ended up having to backtrack a few miles to take some customary small-person-in-front-of-a-big-tree pictures. First, we hit up the redwoods north of Orick near a scenic byway. The best stop was the second pull off when we went through part of the Avenue of the Giants south of Eureka. We pulled off at an area called Founders Grove where several of the large trees had actually fallen over. Seeing a giant tree up in the air is impressive. Seeing the same giant tree on the ground stretched out in front of you with its massive root structure exposed as if someone had stuffed a powerful grenade up into its business made us scream in awe like 10-year-old-boys at a Spiderman convention. (Actually, we'd probably scream in awe at that too.) We took several pictures in front of fallen trees, crudely compared the root structures to body orifices, and killed way too much time at Founders Grove. All worth it.

From there we made it down to California's wine country. We were staying in Santa Rosa but had created an ambitious loop of wineries through Napa, Sonoma, and back up to Santa Rosa. Most of the wine stops would happen the next day. Our only plan that night was to hit up the Francis Ford Coppola winery on the way to our hotel, primarily because I'm a sucker for alcohol in hilarious packaging and they have champagne in juice cans with straws. The Apocalypse Now memorabilia was also a plus. Kim's not much of a wine drinker unless it's the type that is full of residual sugar, so I was prepared to carry most of the weight with the winery activities. We both did a tasting at Coppola though, and after the following days wineries, I can say it was in my top two favorite wineries. I didn't expect much, but the staff was incredibly friendly, the prices were reasonable, and they loaded us up with way more wine than we paid for.

That night we had a delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant in Healdsburg called Scopa (which would pale in comparison to the following night's food). We hit up the bar next door afterwards to get some local flavor (assuming local flavor existed). If local flavor is what we saw, it was a lackluster spectacle of really annoying girls with questionably tight shirts--possibly pregnant, possibly fat--all of whom were hogging the shuffle board table.

The next day our fun, pal-erific, good buddy road trip got uncomfortably romantic. I suppose that is to be expected in wine country, one of the most romantic vacation spots in America. First, we had mud baths on tap for the morning at a spa in Calistoga. Instead of booking individual mud baths we got the "couples" package to save money as well as have company. We didn't realize the set-up was awkwardly ideal for loving couples. We had to strategize a lot of averting of the eyes and ignore the soothing, romantic music. Whatever. Thankfully, we had our own tub of mud. We dipped our entire body into the tub and were covered with hot steamy, sulfuric mud for fifteen minutes. The smell wasn't pleasant, but I did enjoy playing with the mud between my fingers. I'm not much for spa treatments as I think they're mostly a gimmick. I gotta say, this really did leave my skin feeling incredibly soft. Afterwards we had some time in a mineral bath. That was followed by as much time in the spa's swimming pool as we wanted, where I had a grand ole time splashing about with a swimming noodle in the shallow end (I can't swim....Yeah. I know).

Lackluster tasting and questionable art

After our uncomfortably romantic spa date, we headed to our first wineries. I wasn't incredibly impressed by a lot of them. Most were not that welcoming and seemed kind of bland, commercial and over-priced. Other than Coppola, I was a fan of the last one we visited near Sonoma called Gundlach Bundschu (for more than its funny name; the wine and the people were really great too). The other one I liked was Domaine Carneros, which was primarily great for it's beautiful setting. It was the sight of our uncomfortably romantic champagne flight, which we shared on their massive patio with an amazing view. We ate lunch at the Basque Boulangerie, which had some awesome pastries and hot sandwiches. We kept it classy: We stuffed our faces in about ten minutes, left Kim in the restaurant fiending on pickles and panini scraps, while I went to the parking lot to groom a hangnail off my finger. Then, we hit up the rest of the wineries. After the wineries, we went back to the hotel to get dressed for our uncomfortably romantic fancy dinner.

Oh hai, deliciously pretty vegetables!

A good friend of mine from VIAC classes, Clark, is a recent graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in California. I had scoped out this restaurant called Solbar for our one fancy delicious meal on the trip. Solbar had recently received a Michelin star and had great reviews. I figured while we were in the center of delicious fine dining we could increase our foodie budget for one night. It turns out that Clark worked at Solbar. Kitchen hookups at delicious restaurants are the best! He made sure to steer us towards the best items and even forced amazing pork belly on us despite our attempts to stay modest with our gluttony. Oh my god, we at like such fatties; I could have been sick. It was all amazing: roasted vegetables that looked too pretty to eat, a hen of the woods mushroom dish (easily my favorite fungus), pork belly, badass duck, and short ribs. Our uncomfortably romantic day ended in the restaurant's lounge, both of us reclining, stuffed to the brim, and me asking Kim for a belly rub. She declined. We waited for Clark to get off work and hit up some Calistoga nightlife with him at one of their local dive bars. Yes! There are dive bars in wine country; I was so happy. It was great catching up with my fellow cheese buddy and eating the hell out of some unforgettable food.

After some good conversation, we had another night nursing distended food bellies, The next morning we would hit up the main big-city-portion of our adventures.

We're just friends!

Calistoga: winner of the contest for
most hilariously frightening mannequins