More photos

More photos from wine tasting last weekend!

I never realized that wine grapes were so small. I guess it makes sense when you think about it because you want lots of skin contact for the beautiful purple color of wine. But there so small!!

Booker Vineyards, a new winery that Husband has found. The story behind the name is really great. The Booker brothers were adopted by a farming family. They never married and because a fixture in the Paso Robles area. When they died, they donated a lot of money for academic scholarships. I think this winery is located on some of the old Booker land.

When we left Paso Tuesday morning, we drove east to I-5. The route is through some of the emptiest land I have seen, and I grew up in West Texas! It really had a beauty all of its own. The mountains in the distance were gorgeous, even if there was lots of haze. (And the photos were taken from the window of the car at 65 mph!)

We passed through some pistachio or almond farms located in the middle of nowhere. There was probably two miles of trees that went back further than the eye could see. Then all of a sudden, they stopped. It was kind of odd.

It was also odd when we passed through about half a mile of oil derrick farms.

I couldn’t believe how close they were together. I thought that they would bump into each other as they started their “Oil Rain Dance”.

We got out of California just in time. The rains started coming down and LA was featured on StormWatch! You know we got back to MI to balmy weather and sunshine.

OK, I lied. We got back to highs in the low 50s and snow on Friday night. Life sucks.

Coming Home

I like to travel. Especially places I’ve been before. There is always more to discover in a different town. The first trip is like a blind date. You’ve heard one of two things from other people about the town. Either “You’ll love it!” or “It has its charms.” Both are totally misleading and you never know what you are going to get. It’ll either be a great dinner and days of fun, or a stinking T-shirt.

But probably my favorite part of traveling is coming home. It is the usually stuff: the comfortable bed, the kitties, a stocked fridge where a soda doesn’t cost a billion dollars. But the fun part is seeing what has changed in your hometown. Sometimes – not much. But usually there is something new too see.

Traveling in the spring and summer means that you come home to a garden that has too many weeds but something new has bloomed. The grass needs cutting and it’s always fun to see how far the neighbor has started moving into our lawn to cut the grass.

Winter usually means one of two things. Either it has snowed or the snow has melted. If there is snow, you can tell how many neighbors have used your driveway to turn around in. For whatever reason, this irks me. (Trust me, I’m covered with buttons.) I hate the ice that builds up in an unscraped driveway.

This time, coming home meant a thousand new fall colors. When we left, there was still a lot of green in the trees. On the drive to work today, it was like someone tweaked the colors in photoshop. The temperature dropped too. Granted, it wasn’t really warm when we left, but the high was in the lower 40’s when I left the house this morning. I think Max got bigger too. Now, he’s almost a full grown cat! He discovered a green mousey somewhere in the house and has decided this is the new favorite toy. He plays fetch with it!

But the best chance since we’ve been gone is that they resurfaced the road leading out of our neighborhood! We can drive on the road at speed and not have to worry about the potholes ripping the bottom out of the car. At first, we didn’t believe it when we were driving home. It was late and we were tired. But the further we drove, the more excited we got! It’s not completely new, but the worst parts have been resurfaced.

But one thing remains the same here in the Great White North: deer. We were greeted by two deer as we came into the neighborhood. We saw them in time, but I would like to come home one time and not see the garden-munching pests.

Another exciting thing at home – the first fire of the winter season!

White House Snipers

(I wrote this back on Monday but never found internet access until now.)

Sometimes you make choices in life. I had a choice to make, and I decided to travel.

It was either go to a conference or the faculty retreat before classes start. It was a hard decision, but Washington DC beckoned!

Husband and I left early Saturday morning. I thought for sure we would have a great trip based on the AMAZING parking spot that we snagged.

Front row parking at the airport! Not that back row parking is all that bad, but how many people can say they had such an amazing spot? But that was pretty much the highlight of the trip out to DC. The flight was late, screaming kids and rude flight attendants. I brought my “Great Job Tickets” just in case one of the Delta employees impressed me, but I held on to all of them on this trip.

We had dinner at Gordon Biersch and had some nice beer, and Husband got some of their specialty – garlic fries – with his dinner.

It was RAW garlic. One fry and I was burping all evening. Husband didn’t even try any of them because the smell totally turned him off. If was a vampire-free zone around us that evening! He asked for some plain-jane fries but did make the comment that is the waiter said “Dude, whatever. It’s your funeral.” that he might change his mind.

I’ve been to DC a couple of times several years ago, but had never seen the White House. Originally, we wanted to tour the White House, but did you know that you need to contact your Congressman at least one month in advance? And six months is better? Considering I can’t manage to pack my lunch the night before, we didn’t end up touring the White House.

But we did see the outside:

They have fences to keep the Secret Service contained.

Did you know that there are people standing on the roof of the White House?

Husband said that they were snipers. I think that makes me a little nervous. We were a good quarter mile from the White House, but I have a feeling that if one of my exes was up there, he could have hit me, no problem.

We have been spending SOME time at the conference too. I’ve been working on my talk (which I gave today to a standing ovation – NOT!!) but Husband has been attending talks. I’ve gotten to hang out with old labmates but not much else.

More photos later. The museums are all free here so I’ve been spending lots of time looking at cool stuff.

Are you still there?

Still there? Still wanting more photos? You are just insatiable aren’t you?

Good thing that I like to take pictures. Here ya go:

One of the places that we wanted to taste at was Clos des Papes. Remember that whole street sign thing in France? We wandered up and down one street of Chateauneuf-du-Pape for about 10 minutes looking for the winery. We knew the address, but weren’t sure exactly where, because there are no street signs or numbers anywhere. Imagine our chagrin when we saw this:

This was the first place that we tasted at that we didn’t have an appointment. It was supposed to be an open tasting room. Well, when we walked up, there were no signs (see the previous post. Apparently the French’s aversion extends from street signs to signs saying “Enter here for wine tasting.”) We kind of wandered around for a little bit before getting our courage up to actually ring the bell.

It was the first California winery experience we had in France, and it wasn’t nearly as fun as the other places we visited, but how can you go wrong with scenery like this:

We also headed up to Gigondas, and didn’t get lost! (Thanks GPS.) They had a tasting room where you could sample wine from all of the wineries in the area, FOR FREE!! Too bad husband didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel comfortable asking for so many tastes, so we didn’t stay long.

It was pretty and gorgeous countryside, but what caught our attention was a cave in the town!

Next to a building that has the coolest balcony I’ve ever seen. Husband had his camera, I had mine and when you compare the pictures, it is pretty funny. This is the only one with both. His have lots of close ups of the cave and mine have the balcony. I could just imagine Romeo and Juliet being staged from that balcony!

After that, we were pretty much done in the south of France. I highly recommend it! Very laid back and great wine. Avignon is a good central location and lots of people speak English if that is your thing.

We headed back to Paris for the night. It was supposed to be for the afternoon, but the train was detoured for 2 hours. We WALKED from the train station to our hotel so I was pretty glad we didn’t end up bringing home a case of wine. That would have sucked.

We wanted a little time to poke around Paris, but had to make do with a photo of me with the Eiffel Tower in the background:

The next day we flew home and like the wine obsessed people we are, we headed to our favorite restaurant for a wine dinner as soon as we got back. That’s right folks. We didn’t go home. We didn’t shower. We got in the car and drove to a restaurant for more wine.

We look pretty good for being up 20 hours don’t we?

Our friends saw the camera come out and they wanted a picture too:

It’s a pretty good one if I do say so myself!

So that was France. Maybe if you ask nicely, I’ll show you the “project” that I knitted on the plane on the way home. You might want to cover the eyes of any children that might be watching; it’s pretty hideous.

It could be worse…

It could be a slide show that I am forcing you to watch after dinner. You are free to turn off the computer at any point. But seeings as you are still here, sit back and enjoy some more photos (long overdue!!) from France.

I love the history and the beautiful buildings! You just don’t see that in the downtown areas in the states.

This is a church next to where we ate dinner. I don’t know the name of the church at all. I just though it was so beautiful with the amazing blue of the sky.

Next door to the church were some private residences.

I love how they modernized the windows, but made it fit within the style of the square. When it got darker, you could see that they had Christmas strung up in the windows. I loved it!

Most restaurants are closed on Sundays in Avignon. Husband had a very attentive “waiter”.

On Monday, we were on our own. The rest of the birthday revelers had gone home; they couldn’t handle the madness that is wine tasting with Husband. We rented a car:

We didn’t request the sweet Benz, but it was the only one that came with the most amazing invention known to travelers in a foreign land that are crazy enough to drive:

A GPS (you can see it over on the right hand side). Seriously people, Europeans don’t believe in road signs the way that Americans do. I don’t think I saw a single street name at a crossroads. Addresses are pretty much useless if you don’t already know the area. If you have a great map, you can generally get around without many issues. But without a good map or a GPS, you might as well enjoy driving around in circles.

One of the best things about having your own car is that you can yell at the driver to stop at any point. I make Husband stop on the side of the road for some of the strangest pictures. On this trip, it was dirt. I’m going to leave you with a couple more pictures of soil:

This is just outside of Gigondas, northeast of Avignon.

This is about 1 mile away from the above picture.

And if you remember, this is what the ground looks like in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, about 30 minutes away:

Call me a wine geek, but I just can’t get over the difference in the terroir and the impact that it has on the wine!