So I had a little birthday this weekend. Not that I’m trying to draw attention to it or anything. Just a teensy little insignificant birthday. But the thing is, Bri caught wind of this fact and decided to plan out quite the weekend escapade. It required two things on my part: 1) Take a monday off from work, and 2) the ability to drink large quantities of wine while riding a bicycle.

(read more)

Be sure to check out all of our Flickr pictures from the trip.

We started our weekend late, as usual due to my dillydallying. Some of that dillydallying involved me picking up my brand spakin’ new iPhone 4. Yes, this was a little unexpected gift from my work and random typing that somehow gets interpreted as hacking. ANYWAY, the new phone came along for the ride, and coincidentally takes some pretty decent pictures (all from this trip are iphone pics).

Our first stop on Saturday afternoon was Salt Point State Park, up north of Bodega Bay on California’s Sonoma coast. For anyone that’s traveled highway one, you’ll relate with just how beautiful and how slow going the highway is up here. Lots of hairpin turns and breathtaking overlooks.

It didn’t take long to set up camp. The weather was nice and cool, somewhere in the low 60s, which was such a contrast to the 80s and 90s experienced just a few miles inland.

Barbara, a friend of mine from work, just happened to be there the same night, hanging out after biking and swimming 2/3 of a triathlon. She’s getting ready to run in the appropriately named “Barb’s race” in a couple of weeks, and somehow here she is hanging out and relaxing by the water (I’d be freaking out if I were about to put my body through the paces of a triathlon).

There’s a small rocky beach and some picnic benches down on the west side of highway 1 at the park, which are absolutely as picturesque as you can get. Who wouldn’t wax poetic sitting under a windswept sequoia, or contemplating all things zen while stacking rocks on the Pacific?

The next morning was cool and foggy. The mist in the trees muffled everything around, which made for excellent sleeping conditions. By about 10 o’clock the fog had lifted and given way to a glorious sunny day. We took a small hike through the pygmy forest and noticed all kinds of critters around. We crossed paths at one point with a small garter snake, and I of course had to pick it up and chase Bri with it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone leap that high in the air from a standstill. I didn’t get any pictures of the snake unfortunately, but I did get a decent shot of a cool looking banana slug:

After the hike, we drove a very narrow winding road 50 miles east to Geyserville. Bri and I both managed to keep our lunches down despite the twists and turns of the single lane road.

We arrived in Geyserville at the peak temperature of the day, which turned out to be quite a contrast to the coast. Highs here were in the 90s and while it was dry, we were already sweating like crazy. Nevertheless we grabbed our bikes and started down the road to our first winery, Clos du bois. We were sweating buckets, but the air conditioning and refreshing chardonnays helped quite a bit. From there we angled over to Ridge Lytton Springs.

Ridge has some amazing wines (their Monte Bello cabernet competed in the original judgment of Paris in the 70s) and we had an great time exploring the Zins.

From there, it was getting pretty late in the day. We continued our ride up Dry Creek road, and stopped in at Family Wines for one final tasting of the day.

We made it back to our B&B hot, sweaty, smelling like campfire and hallucinating maybe a little from the heat and wine. Needless to say, that shower felt pretty good. We cleaned up, headed out for dinner, then called it a pretty early night. Not a ton of nightlife in Geyserville, but then again, it’s the kind of place where you sit and drink great wines with friends, not pop Cristal in the club.

On our way out the next morning we were casually talking to the innkeeper relaying our wine experiences the day prior, and he immediately said something to the effect of “well if you want to taste wine you can buy in Walmart, then you’re on the right track”. With anyone else, that might have been offensive, but I could tell that this guy was really passionate about wine and wanted to share. So he tipped us off on a great little co-op down in Healdsburg, and boy did we find what we had been missing.

There were several small wineries tucked away behind the town, all with nicely kept small tasting rooms and extremely knowledgeable proprietors eager to share their wines. We learned more about wine in an hour than all of our “Walmart” wine buying in the past.

At some point, I took over in the tasting duties and Bri stuck to being the driver. Looking back, this tradeoff was pretty dangerous in its own right, because each wine I tasted got progressively better as we hopped from winery to winery. It may have hurt the pocketbook a bit, but we ended up with some fantastic wines that I can’t wait to taste a second time.

And that about wraps all of the fun facts from our most recent adventure. If this birthday was any indicator of birthdays to come, I think this getting older thing might just be all right.

Be sure to check out all of our Flickr pictures from the trip. I also took a couple of HD videos with my fancy-pants new phone:

• Tour of the campsite

• View from the beach