Today was Good Friday, in Ireland a day of not drinking. I was talking to a friend at home who got out of work at midnight, and then had nowhere to go because all the pubs are shut. And this was the day myself and Rod headed north in the morning, bound for wine country and a day of wine and champagne tasting.
First of all we headed for Sonoma Valley and wandered the Sebastiani winery, a family-owned vineyard with some interesting stuff in it. It's got one of the two biggest wine casks in the world, and a bunch of really nice carvings on their other casks (it doesn't seem to make a whole amount of economic sense to me to have a guy whose job it is to carve pictures into casks, but they seemed happy enough with it). Rod says the wine here isn't great so next we went to the Buena Vista winery and tasted some of their stuff. As I've said before, I don't really know the difference between anything and anything else similar, but sure, I could tell that each glass wasn't exactly the same thing and with a bit of concentration could even realise how little applicable vocabulary I have to describe what I'm tasting. Then again, who's to say that when I say "red" I'm thinking of the same thing you are? Maybe when I see something red it looks totally different to how it looks to you, but we both know it's red because that's what that colour (however it may appear to each of us) is called.
Following this we drove across the decidedly scenic hills that separate Sonoma Valley from Napa Valley, and stopped for a gourmet (of course) sandwich and a ginger ale in a shop, before hitting the Joseph Phelps vineyard. We tasted another five - or was it six? - wines here, and the more I tasted the less inclined I was to concentrate on noticing the difference anymore. The weather was very sunny, and I seem to have obtained some colour (colour being the absence of white, and it can only be bad and painful) on my arms and neck. Next and final stop was the Domaine Chandon fizzy-stuff-making-place, where I tasted four champagnes (probably due to the weather, my favourite was the regular Brut, the bog-standardest of the lot) and Rod settled for a glass of his personal favourite, which was my second-favourite (I guess drinking and driving laws aren't as rigid here as in Ireland).
So with all that out of the way, we drove back to the outskirts of Oakland and killed a few hours before going for dinner in a swanky place in Rockridge called Garibaldi's. The food, of course, was pretty spectacular, and my offer to pay for it was met with a simultaneous and instantaneous "no you won't!" from both Rod and Ted.
So that's it now. I've had a fantastic, relaxing time, and just as well because tomorrow is going to be absolutely hellish. My flight leaves from San Francisco at a quarter past three, bound for Los Angeles, which it's scheduled to hit at 16:33. Then my flight from there leaves for Sydney at 22:30 (!) and goes for what as near as I can figure is thirteen hours and fourty minutes. I'll be crossing the international dateline which means that I'll pretty much skip all of Easter Sunday completely, which is a shame because it's a holiday I really enjoy when I'm at home. So anyway, needless to say I'll be pretty freakin' exhausted at that stage, but that doesn't matter, because the local time when I touch down will be ten past six in the morning! There I'll have to get to the train station, get on the right train, transfer in the right place, get to the right station and phone Dizzy & Britta in the hopes that they can come and pick my corpse up from the platform. Apart from the health-&-safety considerations, how I'm going to keep track of what Day I'm on for the purposes of this diary thing is beyond me.
Well wish me luck, I haven't the faintest idea when I'll get Internet access again...