Another long weekend of dating type activities with Elle, and here's a brief, very partial report.
Elle, the non-IG, drove up here Friday night, fairly late. I cooked a pizza and we talked and did the other sorts of things that young, healthy heterosexual members of the opposite sex do in the privacy of their own home(s). Said activities went on (as they are wont) for hours longer than initially anticipated, and as a result we weren't up and around until mid-day on Saturday. Thus were our plans for morning wine tastings scuttled!
We did get packed up and out the door in time to drive way north to Calistoga, for the newly-opened, largely-magnificent,
Castle di Amorosa. We had reservations for a tour in the afternoon, (which was wise, since it was all sold out) and it was quite nice. The castle is huge; far smaller than a real, functioning one built 700 years ago would have been, but for something built by a private individual as a dream home/business activity, it was gigantic. Far, far larger than any of the castle-type exhibits you'd see at Disneyland of
Harry Potter World or the like.
It's the centerpiece of an active winery, and on the tour you get to go down into underground tunnels that they dug for wine aging, but mostly because the owner loved castles and wanted his own with as much verisimilitude as he could afford. (Quite a bit of it, as it turned out.) Included deep within the vaults are lots of museum-type rooms with suits of armor, mounted weapons, and even a large and practically functional torture chamber/dungeon. Lots of photos of the property
can be found via google, and it's every bit as cool as it looks.
The tour includes a private wine tasting for your group in one of the custom-built tasting rooms deep below the castle surface, and while none of their wines are remarkable (the whole thing is still quite recent and the wine vines haven't had time to mature yet), it was a great wine tasting architectural faux-cultural experience. Made slightly more enjoyable by the fact that I knew more than the tour guide about most of the wine-related things of which he spoke.
For our evening activity we adjourned to the CIA. The Culinary Institute of America has a campus in norther Napa Valley, and besides occupying a fantastically gorgeous structure, they run
a professional gourmet restaurant, which, in partnership with the Wine Spectator magazine and most of the best vineyards in California, boasts an eye-boggling, 25-page wine list.
PDF link, but it loads fairly quickly, and it's worth it just to skim over the prices. Some affordable vintages can be found, but that's not the funny part. They've got numerous years of Opus One, whose Cab is generally the most expensive wine in America ($250+ a bottle), and those aren't even in the top 50 priciest they list. I'd never seen a $2000 bottle of wine before. And I still haven't, other than listed on their menu, but it was fun to see it there. If $500 for a glass of old grapes is out of your price range, they've got plenty of other limited edition vintages in the $500-1000 range.
We didn't get any wine, cause um... money. But we did get an amazing appetizer dish, and I got a pasta dish with mushrooms and spinach that was more or less exquisite. I don't have a good enough memory to list the best pasta dishes I've eaten in my life, but this one is definitely going into the top 5.
We ended up not staying overnight in the area, since nothing is affordable in Napa, and since the only reasonable hotel options were in Vallejo. Which is way south of Napa, and only about 40 miles from my apartment. And since we felt like we'd done enough wine stuff for the weekend, it seemed pointless to drop $70 on a hotel that was less than an hour from my apartment. So I drove us back here while Elle napped, which gave her energy for more active pursuits upon our return.
Sunday we got up a little earlier, and after brunching at a restaurant where I could obtain an order of my coveted
huevos rancheros, I drove us down to the Golden Gate Bridge. Elle has lived in the Bay Area her whole life, but she lives down on the peninsula, south of The City, and had somehow only been over the world famous GGB 2 or 3x in her life. (I've been dozens of times, almost all since moving to the North Bay 2.5 years ago.)
If you've not been in the Bay Area, it's not that unusual for locals to have never or seldom passed over
the Golden Gate Bridge. It's maybe the most famous bridge in the world, and is guaranteed to appear in any movie or TV show set in the area, but it's quite possible to never need to travel over it. I never did when I lived in the East Bay with Malaya, and had only seen it when doing tourist stuff when relatives visited. I have many times in the last 2.5 years since I've lived in the North Bay, but unless you're going from northern SF to the North Bay, or vice versa, taking the Bay Bridge is usually a better option. There's little population north of the city, Napa and Sonoma and Sacramento and other attractions are far inland/east, and reaching the GGB through downtown SF is usually hell, since there aren't any highways or freeways there. Just dozens and dozens of blocks of city streets.
As you can see, the GGB isn't even
Google's recommended route from San Rafael to San Mateo. Taking 101 over the GGB and through western SF is a shorter route, but 101/19th street is about 8 miles of fairly constant stop lights. I counted once, when taking that route to Elle's, and there were 30 or 31 stop lights over that 8 mile stretch of 25-35MPH road. It's not bad late at night, when I'm usually coming home from her place, since one can catch maybe 22 or 24 of the lights. But in the daytime it's crowded with other cars and you're lucky to make half the lights without slowing down or stopping. I'd rather drive 7 miles further on fast freeways than 7 mile less on city streets. But YMMV. (Do people use YKMV in those progressive nations infected with the Metric system? Or is the acronym translated without translation?)
Well, actually your mileage/kilometerage won't vary, but your tolerance for slow traffic and stop lights may.
At any rate, Elle didn't cross the GGB on Sunday either. It was a gorgeous, hot Sunday, so we had to park way up on the scenic hills above the bridge, where we walked around the old military gun fortifications, before descending to the bridge itself. We walked out along the bridge to the first huge tower, took lots of photos, looked over the edge at all the dropped hats and water bottles and such that land on girders just below the surface but out of reach of any sane mortal, and enjoyed the howlingly-gusty wind. Numerous pictures were taken then and all throughout the weekend, and may be posted at some point, though you'd probably be wise not to hold your breath for that.
After the GGB visit we drove a few miles north to Sausalito, site of one of my earlier, unsuccessful internet dating site first dates. This one went better, though Elle and I basically recreated past events. She kept asking what I'd done with that other woman and where we went, and since that previous Sausalito visit mostly consisted of walking along the boardwalk and ducking into the various art galleries and souvenir shops, it wasn't real hard or exciting to recreate it. The company was better this time though, and we had fun. We even hit
the same restaurant for dinner, though the one thing I'd had there that was great, a sort of apple pie dessert, was tragically sold out that day. That they were unable to make more, at 7pm on a Sunday, didn't speak well of their chefs, or their ability to make their own desserts rather than just ordering them in, pre-prepared and frozen at some distant processing location.
The clam chowder was awesome, though. I always like clam chowder, but most times there are these inedible, chewy, rubbery chunks of something all strewn through it. I assume they are there for flavoring, but they are just bowl-clogging dreck in most cases. This time there were slightly rubbery things in it, but in larger chunks and they were not difficult to masticate into a form that could be swallowed without danger of suffocation. Bonus points for that.
There was a lot more fun stuff over the weekend, but typing this update has already taken me well beyond the time I'm allocating for blogging these days, so you'll have to use your memory. Or go read one of the countless thousands of blogs that are run by people who actually deserve your patronage.
Don't feel too neglected, Sunday evening I caught a glimpse of a the TV in the restaurant bar, and realized that I was in the process of passing the first autumnal weekend in my adult life that didn't involve at least checking (and generally watching) quite some amount of college and/or professional football. Watching is out, since I've not had a TV in a couple of years, but even checking highlights wasn't a priority when I had Elle to do stuff with. And if I'd had an hour or two to of computer time during the weekend, I'd have spent it more productively than skimming espn.com for scores and highlights anyway. (Not that I'm perfectly able to avoid the siren seductions of football; I spent a couple of hours early Monday morning watching NFL highlights while I sipped a potent concoction and tried to let lethargy come over me.)
As for the weekend's other fungal growths, check out these pictures. They're from my garden, of a huge pot I've got a fairly-healthy Star Jasmine growing in. Last week a little cluster of mushrooms appeared, turned bright yellow and swelled up to about a hand in height. They soon withered and deflated, but were sort of replaced by another bunch of the same fungi, pushing up through the straggling remains of a once proud cluster of parsley. Now, just as those are withering, there's been an absolute explosion of new yellow growths. Dozens and dozens of them, pushing up out of the roots of the star jasmine all across the center of the large pot, like whiteheads from the face of a sugar-addicted teenager.
The photos don't really capture the three dimensional nature of these things, but they are almost scary in their inexorable, irresistible, Sorcerer's Apprentice-like advance. If even 10% of them carry on for another few days, the entire center of the plant will be solid with the swollen yellow growths, the jasmine and the other things growing in it choked and muffled like sticks in a bowl of swollen mushrooms.
I'll try to get a picture to preserve the moment.
All those yellow dots are incoming fungi.
Closer view of the current blooming crop as it practically pushes through the dying second wave. They're rather penis-y, eh?
Update: Appropriately, (she's a research scientist) Elle
hunted around online and
found information about
these growths. They're almost comically known as Yellow Houseplant Mushrooms, with a scientific name of
leucocoprinus birnbaumii (luke-o-kuh-PRY-niss burn-BAUM-eee-eye). As expected,
they are poisonous. No word on their hallucinogenic properties, but if I ate some I might see some interesting sights on the way to the emergency room?
Labels: elle, gardening
