checking in

Work has been a tad overwhelming since I returned from vacation two weeks ago. It’s been impossible to blog or read blogs. I hope that this will change after I ship my issue to the printer on Thursday or Friday. In the meantime, here’s a wrap on my birthday trip to Northern California.

The weather was amazing, bright blue skies and warm. I’ve posted my photos, which pretty much capture how pretty Napa is in October.

Food was one of the driving forces for choosing Northern California as our destination. Chez Panisse and The French Laundry, whose reputations are deserved, offered incredible multi-course meals we’ll not soon forget. Equally memorable, though, were other restaurants where we took meals.


John and I also stood in line for at least a half hour to order burgers at Taylor’s Refresher, a roadside institution for nearly sixty years. The burgers were solidly good and the sweet potato fries were stupendous. Besides, milkshakes and sodas, the beverage menu offers beer and wine, including the half bottle of Karl Lawrence cab for half the price we paid the night before at the French Laundry. Only in Napa.

Rounding out our meals, we ditched our reservations at Zuni Café and Piperade to eat sushi at an incredibly hip Japanese restaurant with a technobeat, Ozumo. We sat at the sushi bar and were served an amuse—a first when out for sushi—of a tuna “salad” on cucumber wafers. To start, we ordered hanabi (slices of hamachi and avocado with a warm ginger-jalapeno ponzu sauce. We ate the following nigiri—maguro, mushi ebi (tiger prawn), hamachi (as always), sake, kampachi (amber jack), and kaki (kumamoto oyster). We had rolls—yokozuna (grilled unagi, crab, tobiko, avocado and asparagus), spicy scallop (scallop, kaiware, cucumber).


For play, we drove. A lot. Our rental Sebring convertible was fun and we took advantage of top-down weather to see as much of the countryside as we could. We also took a hike in Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, which encompasses Mount St. Helena where RLS lived in an abandoned miner’s cabin in 1880 and wrote vignettes about Napa Valley. The two-mile hike took us to the monument marking the site where the cabin stood and from where we had great views.


Back in San Francisco, we had a nice stroll through Chinatown and brunch at a random restaurant in North Beach, which was gearing up for the culminating day of a weekend-long Columbus Day celebration. At the intersection of these two diverse neighborhoods, sits one of the country’s most famous bookstores, City Lights. We browsed. I could have purchased piles of books. Then we lifted a pint and spent an hour reading next door at Vesuvio. John and I had the entire second floor to ourselves—just us and the ghosts of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, and every other member of the Beat Generation.

I can’t wait for our next trip to No Cal!

ETA: photos