Santa-Rosa

10th September 2009 It’s Fleet Week in San Francisco. Somehow we’ve managed to be heading for San Francisco on an extremely busy weekend, so it’s up early to leave Santa Rosa and get to the city for a decent time. Fleet Week is a celebration of the armed forces in the USA and features the Navy, Army, Marines and Coast Guard, they have recruitment stands and navy ships alongside the piers and on Saturday and Sunday an airshow featuring the Blue Angels as the star act (the American version of the Red Arrows). ...

For our first day in Sonoma County, we wanted to go to the Ravenswood winery. Back at home, we are quite partial to a drop or two of the Ravenswood Zinfandel wine, which is produced here in California, so making that our first stop seemed to be the right thing to do. Ravenswood run tours every day at 10:30, so we arrived shortly after 10 and paid our $15 each for the tour. We were then given four different white wines and a rose to taste. Despite not drinking much white, there were a couple in amongst there that would go down very nicely on a summers day! ...

October 5th & 6th The Lost Coast lies between the Kings mountain range and the Pacific coast and became ’lost’ when it was deemed too expensive for a highway to be built due to its steepness. They weren’t joking!! It should actually have been called the lost mountains since we spent a good hour and a half getting to the coast and then another hour and a half back to the highway. The views along the coast though were fantastic, but there is nothing else along it but cows. ...