On Saturday morning we thought we were early birds in Yosemite. When we reached the South entrance we spent a nice half an hour just on the line to get in to thr park. Apparently the nice weather and Saturday had lots of people thinking that this makes a nice National Park day. In the Yosemite park magazine was a story of "red bear is a dead bear" which means that for every bear that has died in the park mainly due traffic accidents there would be a red bear marker by the road. However we did not see any of those.
We went to see the Bridalveil Falls, which were especially spectacular this time of year with all the water flowing down. While taking the pictures we were covered in fine mist. The temperature was rather high (at least 33C) and with a roof down for several hours it is likely to cause at least a minor sun stroke (at least to some :) Yosemite was a really big park, and the views were spectacular. However also inside the park it was as busy as at the entrance, and taking pictures of "pristine nature" without a group of 30 japanese tourists and 20 americans was rather challenging.
For the evening we headed to the town of Lodi, which is bit like Napa, but not as touristy. The road there was really beautiful going through big fields. Again within few tens of miles the scenery changed from the mountains of Yosemite to the fields and hills near Lodi. The challenging part is that always the one who is not driving tends to get some motion sickness as the roads are quite curved and twisted.
In Lodi, we first went to a place that had Wine and Roses in the name. The price for the night was "a bit" more than we were willing to pay (and we forgot our Burberry outfit and Bottega Venega clutch back home so we did not really match the other guests.. :). Surprisingly there were no hotels in downtown so we decided to go for a motel by the side of the town. After some strange conversations ("what are you looking for?" "A room" "What kind of room?" "Anything you have is fine" "Well what do you want?") we got ourselves a decent room for the night and headed for the downtown. We ended up to an microbrewery/winery and had some pizza & pasta for dinner. It seemed to be also some school ending (prom??) party on-going where teenage kids would drive with wild limosine's and listening to some Kanye West type of music. We felt ourselves old ;-)
On Sunday we wanted to get a good breakfast, and after trying few places and noticing it is relatively busy because of mother's day, we ended up to a place called Omelet House. A real American diner! We sat on the counter and ordered omelets. The twist was, that the omelets would come both with potatoes (we chose hash browns) and dessert (eg. A stack of Donald Duck pancakes!). We were extremely full after the breakfast, and the waitress said afterwards that "You did really good". Needleds to say, we could not finish everything. Apparently our five weeks in the US have not been wasted ;-) Across from the breakfast place there was an adult store, that also offered "dancing" - this itself is nothing new but the place looked so sad, falling apart and just bad, that we just had to take a picture of it.
We continued the day with some wine tasting. As we were driving, we tried to limit the amount of actually drinking the wine, but this turned out to be really difficult. At one place we were encouraged to really take mouth full of the wine and swallow everything, since the taste buds are located on the back of your mouth. Also spitting/throwing the wine out from the glass was not really the habit there. After three places (with min 4 tastings per place) we decided it is probably better to quit :) during the tastings we also heard some interesting stories of how the vineyards are doing, and surprisingly many were started within the last 10 years. In the evening we did some googling, too bad that the vineyards and wineries are priced starting from $1 million and up.. We learned also, that we really really really do not like Zinfandel, even though apparently Lodi is the Zinfandel-place-to-be.
For Sunday evening we went to the city of San Rafael, which is half hour drive from San Francisco. We drove to the downtown to enjoy dinner in a nice Italian restaurant. Next to us sat a family who were of dutch descendance, but we kept quiet for our dutch connections :) We also saw some pretty interesting characters wondering around the streets, which has not happened so much in the smaller cities. We ended the evening with some pretty good ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery.
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