Last week's summary: No weight change, that because I wasn't walking. 3.6 miles for the week. I almost finished my one letter to my Best Brit Friend (and then when we got home, I found a phone call from her! I tried calling back yesterday, but I must have the wrong city code.) I got rid of a number of magazines, and went in the back room once, otherwise it was another week lost.

Rich went to a school board meeting yesterday, wearing green. Sister Principal, a graduate of Notre Dame, forgot and wore blue!

Our room was the gable on the right.

Quotes from the trip:

• I think the style is to go and pick anything green & call it salad. (Rich, commenting on the bitter green salad we got the first night.)
• Don't fall! The kids will then argue if you were pushed.
  Oh, you think they'll argue? (Spouse A and Spouse B, we alternated. He also claimed he couldn't lose me in the woods as the kids would figure it was deliberate. He said they'd know WHY, too. Grumble.)
• Reality is an illusion brought on by the temporary absense of beer. (Sign at the North Coast Brewing Company, which was also the source of the bitter green salad.)
• The wine is bottled poetry. (Sign in Napa Valley. We were too early Sunday for any of these wineries and any in the Alexander Valley. Monica had been quite adamant that we should stop in the Anderson Valley. We did, mostly for a bathroom. Many are closed for the season, and the first one we stopped at charged $3 for a tasting, so we skipped it. We went to three, in the end. I didn't notice any "bottled poetry." I didn't take my pain pills so we could do some tasting, which I paid for quite thoroughly Sunday night. I had to get up at 2 AM and nosh a biscotti, so I could have a pain pill.)
• You RAT! (Me, the night before, when I went to pack up the fancy foods M&M gave us for our anniversary, and discovered that Rich had been nibbling at the edges.)
• God forbid you should drive three miles out of your way! (Me. This was the bathroom fight. It's amazing we had any fun on this vacation at all, you know? I commented, as we left the Alexander Valley, that I'd really wanted to stop at a winery, if just for the bathroom. Rich agreed, he really had to go. We'd missed the McDonald's in Cloverdale and I saw the frontage road that would go back to it and directed Rich along it. He drove a few blocks and u-turned, since the McDonald's was three miles back. This is when I said the above. Then...)
• And I didn't even have any coffee. (Rich. He drove along the road till he found a turnout and a bush. I couldn't believe this. He went out and took care of his needs, and came back commenting on how much better he felt, how badly he'd needed that bush, because he hadn't even had coffee. I was in total bitter cold fury for the next 20 miles, since I was the first to mention this potty need, and since I HAD had some coffee, but he was all right, so it was fine, right? As I say, it's amazing this vacation went so well considering this shaky start.)
• Do not ride bicycles, skateboards, or horses on sidewalk. (Sign in Boonville.)

So we left at 7:40 in the morning on Sunday. It was cloudy and a bit cold, the first rainy Sunday in months. Most of the trip, as outlined above, is through wine country. The vineyards were actually interesting. We passed the old Christian Brothers winery where we always took company. It's now the Graystone restaurant of the Culinary Institute of America. I wonder if it's still run by the Christian Brothers? At Asti we passed the Italian Swiss Colony restaurant, now I believe defunct. This was the first winery I ever went to, in 1960. My Mom took me. I was thrilled in the tasting room (before I got a glass of water) that the pourer claimed to mistake me for 19. I don't know who or what is in that winery now.

In the Napa valley, the bright neon yellow-green mustard is growing along the ground, with the old black gnarled vine stumps sticking up out of it. In the Alexander Valley, less mustard. The vines are staked, and cut with two branches off to the side. In one vineyard they looked like they were shrugging, and in another it looked like a field of crucifixes. The Navarro Winery in the Anderson Valley has a bathroom. Their chart for the wines they are pouring and the bottles have different numbers, so I wound up buying a bottle of something other than what I ordered, but it was OK. We went next door to Greenwood Ridge. The wine pourer also had written a book, but since it was about Hollywood, I wasn't interested. There they have a cork sculpture which is fun to see. The third winery was Handley Cellars, which doubles as an importer. Rich was quite taken with a New Guinea war canoe. I liked an Oaxacan lizard. Molas (which we have one of, given us by our friend Ted) are going for $98.

We saw a Great Blue Heron as well as lots of egrets. I saw a deer while I was sulking. There was a landslide along the way. Boonville is where the homeschooling hero, whose kids went to Harvard, lives. He's now on the school board, I believe. The town also has its own dialect, Boontling. I can understand why "pike" is the word for "walk or travel" but "horn of zeese" for a cuppa coffee is a mystery. We passed a landslide, and it was raining, and we could see where other slides might well happen, to us.

Rich almost forgot to concentrate on driving when we reached highway 1 but fortunately, no one was in the oncoming lane as he admired the view. After that we remembered our jobs, he drives, I look. And we arrived at Fort Bragg about 12:30. We went to check out the room, and I was initially disappointed. At first it seemed like the view didn't make up for the shower, but I warmed to it during the stay.

This is the picture that had my hopes up.

It suddenly dawned on Rich that he hadn't packed a book. Actually, there was a book with stories by Anatole France and some others in the room that he might have enjoyed. I, of course, not only had a book or three, but I enjoyed reading the room journals. It's neat knowing something of the lives of the people who were there. Everyone has a story. We also read, later, that the Lodge has a library, but we never saw it. (As I said, I wish we'd met Charles our host earlier. The other staff were very friendly, but distant. Apparently they serve wine and Brie of an evening. We never knew about it.) The Ft. Bragg bookstores were closed on Sunday, but Mendocino, later in the afternoon, had open ones. (One was a feminist bookstore, but fortunately he'd already stocked up.) Bookstore browsing led us to a small book written by a local 12-year-old about Glass Beach, so it was by no means a waste of time!