Week in Review

Hello, dear blog readers! Well, I finally got around to posting some of my pictures on Snapfish. (I really do miss Yahoo Photos, but alas.) If anyone did not receive the e-mail and would like to see some pictures, let me know. I figured I'd tell the story here in the blog and let you view the photos at your leisure since there are too many to post here.

We started out by my coming home from a very stressful night of work on Tuesday morning of last week. Some of you already saw the previously-posted fire pictures; it turns out that the blazes were just a little closer to home than we thought. Although we were not in any immediate danger of losing our home, the air quality was SO bad (I was feeling somewhat hoarse after a night of work) that we felt the need to evacuate. We were listed in the voluntary/pseud0-recommended evacuation zone, anyway.

The road trip started with us driving up to Napa. We stayed at a Best Western in the northern corner of the town of Napa. The place was awesome! It was more like a bed-and-breakfast than a hotel chain. Alas, they were booked for the rest of the week, so we moved across town to another Best Western. We thought we'd make an evacuation theme out of it. :o)

Our first day in town was spent locating the other Best Western and finding some lunch. Mike and I ate at the Ristorante Allegria, which was an Italian place. The food was a little cheaper because it was the lunch menu, plus they were giving out extra samples of stuff to their customers. I have to say, for as much as I love Sergio's in Chicago, this place was pretty darn good eating. (Yes, Mike had the camera through most of that lunch, but we really did enjoy the food and wanted to remember some of it.) After lunch, we checked into the other Best Western, and Mike proceeded to rebuild my poor laptop. We also drove around Napa Valley and took some pictures of the grape vines.

The following day, we had lunch at The Bouchon restaurant, a French establishment in Yountville, which is north of Napa. It is a very cute, quaint little town in the heart of the valley. They had the best lamb I've ever had in my entire life, and I was thrilled to come home and find that I had the same recipe in my Barefoot Contessa cookbook. Hooray!! After lunch, we meandered over to a French antique store, which also was the wine tasting bar for the Hill Family Estates. It was a really neat store with lots of hardwood antiques in both simple and ornate French styles, and the guy behind the counter was very friendly and helpful, even though we didn't buy any French antiques. He didn't charge us for the wine tasting, so we picked up a bottle of their Rose. (I normally don't care for rose wines, but theirs was pretty good.)

Parenthetically, Mike and I got the feeling that most of the wineries make a good chunk of change from the wine tastings. We figured not everyone who comes through the valley is financially able to buy a bottle of wine and/or become members of every winery, so they make their money on tastings.

That being said, we went to the next winery that our waitress from Le Bouchon recommended to us: The Robert Sinskey winery. The outdoor of the buildings had beautiful landscaping and stonework. They had a pond with several moderately-sized fish. I thought they looked like fancy catfish; Mike said they were goldfish. Anyway, when they saw us, they immediately swam up and started begging thinking that they were going to be fed. It was pretty funny.

We followed that visit with a drive down the other side of the valley to the Monticello Winery, which was closed. Luckily for us, the Andretti Winery was right down the lane. (He's apparently some sort of race car driver.) Even though we didn't taste much wine, we sat outside and enjoyed the patio of their Italian-style villa. It was a beautiful place; I went a little crazy taking pictures of the grounds there.

On Friday, we checked out and headed for the Sequoia National Park. We didn't realize two things: how long of a drive it was to get there, and that there were no gas stations for miles and miles around. We made it up to the national monument before the sun set (some of the photos were taken of the valley from the road on the way up the mountain). Some of the trees don't look that big in the pictures due to the fact that there are fences around all of the trees, so you can't get closer than about 15-20 feet away. If you look at the scale of some of the smaller trees next to the big ones, though, you can sort of get a feel for just how big they are. We shot some pictures of the General Grant and General Lee (General Grant is the 3rd largest tree in the world), and then we had to head out.

On the way down the mountain, we drove through a couple of small towns literally praying for a gas station. Fortunately for us, we were going downhill, which did not require gas. We made it all the way down the mountain (some extra 20-40 miles of switch-back driving) to a slum town where we got some gas and fled due to the feeling that we were in the ghetto.

We came back to Escondido on Saturday to find that it had rained just a little bit. We drove through the southern end of town (about 1-1.5 miles from us as the crow flies?) to see what damage had been done. The fire jumped across I15 and burned the surrounding hillside, which accounts for the dull orange glow after the sun came up in some of my pictures. It proceeded to burn a good chunk of the hillside with houses randomly burned here and there. We proceeded to Orfila. While you may or may not be able to see that the hillsides were black, well, they were. Some of their grape vines were singed/burned. Behind the Orfila winery is a golf course. If you look a the pictures, there is burned rubble on top of the hill with golfers going about their business in the bottom of the snapshot. When we drove back into Escondido, we were able to get a better look at the fire brigade which had completely taken over the football/soccer/baseball fields and parking lots of the local high schools and town mall. It was truly an impressive show of manpower.

All in all, a great trip. We give thanks to the Lord for preserving our health and our stuff when there were over 1000 area homes that were burned. Please continue to pray for our firefighters. Rumors have it that even though the fires are close to contained, the Santa Anna winds are supposed to whip up again this weekend.