We woke up on the fourth day of our road trip in Ukiah, California, in one of a string of equally forgettable hotels by the highway - the type of hotel that one ends up in when one is traveling with no specific itinerary save, 'let's wait 'til we're tired and then start looking for a place to stop'. This tactic, by the way worked fine for us in Ukiah but would later come back to bite us in the behind in a big way in beautiful, but outrageously overpriced, Gorda 'by the sea' (I'll get to that later).
One other point I should mention about ending up in Ukiah for the night, if you ever take this trip you will encounter a fork in the road along Highway 101 in Leggett, California. At this juncture (literally) you will be faced with making the difficult decision over whether to head west towards Fort Bragg and Highway 1 or continue on the 101 towards Ukiah and the Napa Valley. As I believe you will agree, such decisions are best left to the mindless, random workings of chance or, as I prefer, the abstract pull of simple whim and fancy. Thus, when the road divided before us, my mind ran to thoughts of Billy Bragg weighed against happy memories of drinking red wine out of the bottle around midnight bonfires on summer nights. What's a girl to do? When I later learned from a 'friend' on Facebook that the stretch of highway from Fort Bragg to San Francisco is the money spot as far as coastal views go, the blow was comfortably softened by the glow of the wine tasting we'd enjoyed at the Chateau St. Jean Winery (and the realization that there were plenty more coastal views ahead of us). That's all I have to say about it.
In my 'Sideways' tainted perception of California wine country, it turned out that wine tasting in Napa Valley was quite different than expected. Chateau St. Jean was much more polished and orderly than the rustic winery environment suggested in the film. Also, as we drove along the winding side roads leading off of the main highway, I half expected to pass Sandra Oh on a scooter (did she ride a scooter in that movie, or am I getting mixed up with some other movie?), but we, in fact, encountered very little evidence of scooters, philandering singles, or mid-life crisis burdened men acting younger than their age. But still and all, and I say this comfortably knowing that you will forgive the perhaps inappropriately low-brow flavour of such a comment, the wine was pretty tasty. Yes, it was. We purchased two bottles of 2006 Chateau St Jean Cabernet Sauvignon Sonoma County and a bottle of white truffle olive oil (that I believe was manufactured in France).
We arrived in San Francisco in the mid-to-late afternoon with plenty of time to snap some shots from the viewpoint at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, settle into our hotel, and take a short walking tour of the city that included Union Square and China Town. I'm going to leave it there because San Francisco is too fabulous a city to tack on some comments at the end of this blog post ('Gobsmacked, I tell you!). We'll save the details for next time.
View my West Coast Road Trip Flickr set.
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