Napa 2011

Last weekend over President's Day Thor and I took a trip down to St. Helena, CA to visit our great family - Linda and Garry Rose!  Linda is Ralph's cousin, and we always enjoy seeing them, and getting a chance to visit - it always involves lots of coffee and fun chats!  Anyhow - we had a fabulous weekend, but I feel like I'm getting behind on posting pictures, so I'm just going to toss them up here and put captions on everything.  As usual - I can't remember how to upload the pictures so they show up in the correct order, and I also have trouble figuring out how to move the pictures around once they're uploaded....I know, I'm hopeless! 

Linda & I at Benessere with the sign welcoming us to the winery! This cracked us up. Linda & Garry know the wine maker at Benessere - so he 'rolled out the red carpet for us'

A close up of our welcom sign

On our last day in CA Thor and I did a great hike up out of Calistoga. The colors were beautiful - here's a shot of Thor heading down the trail.

The trees were all draped in this beautiful lichen

The view from our lunch spot

Giving Thor the karate chop - with my ninja hood up. It was quite chilly up at the top!

On our way down Thor spied a little finger of single track snaking off into the woods.  We followed it and came across a great biking trail - complete with banked turns and this crazy teeter-totter

 

I'm showing off how tall the poison ivy is in this shot here - waaaay over my head - and thick on both sides of the trail!

Took this early morning shot on my jog Sunday morning.

Another jogging pic

The weather was cold, cold, cold when we showed up on Friday night. We went to visit Pride on Saturday, and there was snow up in the vineyards!  They said it hasn't snowed in the valley like that since 2007.

Self portrait - Pride Vineyards

lichen on a rock along our hike