Ledson Hotel & Harmony Lounge Sonoma

Arrived home around 7:30pm Fairfield, CA Street ...

... with Wendy so Jeff, Tim, Roger and Angie continued the evening in the bars and Wendy and Greg called it a night at about 11.30pm.

Chrissie thoroughly enjoyed her evening in Sonoma. Sally and Rob and the children took her to a "Pot Luck", where a whole bunch of friends meet up and take food and wine and beer and have a great time chilling out and catching up. Later on there were some extra drinking sessions for the adults and a late night was had by all.

Of all the big wine growing regions in the world we probably knew the least about Californian wines. We knew that there was a lot of hype around their Zinfandel and that they had some interesting Pinot's and apparently produced a few good buttery Chards so we were pretty excited to learn more. IMH: More than 500 wineries exist in the Napa and Sonoma Counties. Napa Valley is probably the most well known wine region in California, but also known for ...

... Sparkling wine ($30). We now have 9 bottles of wine plus a bottle of port to drink in the next 8 nights as we cannot take any home as we already have 2 bottles of Morgans Spice we bought on the way out and Customs wont allow anymore back in. If its rubbish weather in Yosemite these should do us nicely! Back to the hotel about 5pm, Catriona started packing away for tomorrow while I typed up the blog. The evening ...

... the caves beneath the hill where they store their wine in barrels at a higher humidity to reduce wine loss due to evaporation and a lower constant temperature. They had demonstration vines growing where they explained how the different grapes grow and how the different shaped trestles are installed depending on the type of grape being grown. Wine making seems an awful lot more complicated ...

... source. We walked in and glanced around for a while before this man came up to us and realized we knew nothing about wineries. Luckily Elliot "From Arlington, VA" helped us tremendously. We thought coming in that we would be treated poorly and looked down upon, but not at St. Francis. Elliot taught us many things such as how to taste a wine (sip, swirl, sip, eat, sip), when a wine is at its ...

... are fantastic. We absolutely blitzed the place with flyers, t-shirts and bracelets and it was hard to find anyone anywhere near the mass that didn't know about us by the time it was all over! We're staying in a hostel downtown; pretty posh compared to our usual digs and its a luxury to have so many food options and the other comforts that come with a city. Today is an off ...

... we had to fly a different airline to get to Athens to meet our cruise ship. So in London, we had to remove our luggage and then check them back in through Alitalia, our connecting flight. No worries, since we had 3 hours to kill before our Alitalia flight to Milan, where we connect to Athens. Hah! We got to the Alitalia counter and the queue snaked for what seemed like miles, while there is only 1 person behind the counter. My God! Will we ever make our flight? Thankfully, after ...

... leisure wear' :) Im fully wardrobed out in USA style thift store jog pants!...I really should be going to Disney land....id probably look REAL SYLISH there! :) Weve booked to go to alcatraz on tuesday....it'll be hard to not wear the LA county jail t-shirts when we go :) we need to leave here...its just too easy to fit in!!...and thats scarey:O weve got free email/internet in the hostel here, so no doubt there ...

... seeing great wonders: things built to last. But what possesses a person, or rather hundreds of thousands of them, to spend their entire lives building something they will never see complete with their own eyes and never live to enjoy? What is it about us that makes us want people in the distant future to see the stuff they built? Or is that even on their mind? Maybe for most people it's just a job that pays the bills in a society successful enough ...