Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Ah California, where you can surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon!
February 23, 2010, 10:53 pm
Mike wanted to go skiing at Tahoe this season, and had vacation booked for the Family Day week even before we decided to go to Vancouver for New Years. And even after Vancouver and Whistler, he still wanted to go to California. We then realized that the weekend leading up to it was super busy with Chinese New Years and Valentine’s Day. It’s our 5 year anniversary, so it was a good reason as any to celebrate. We ended up leaving on Sunday afternoon, in order to have CNY family dinner first.
Flying to the US from Canada is such a pain. We had a couple of Maple Leaf Lounge passes that were expiring at the end of Feb, so wanted to get in early to make use of it. However, they only let people into the security area based on departure time. They were also super strict on the carry-on allowance and made everyone put their bag into the cage to check. Then we got the stupid arrow for enhanced security check, and ended up getting everything searched. At the end, we only got an hour to spend at the lounge, even though we arrived at the airport 3 hours early.
The rest of the flight was uneventful (the movie selection sucked). We rented a 2010 Hyundai Sonata for the week, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it came with XM radio. It also offered iPod integration, but we didn’t have the right cable for it. We considered renting a Prius, but it was too expensive ($50 more and we could have gotten a C-class).
We stayed at Yuan’s place in Santa Clara for most of the week. It was just down the street from where I used to live. Even so, I seemed to have forgotten how to get around there anymore. The weather was really nice while we were there; we were lucky as it’s been particularly cold and rainy there that winter.
Monday just happens to be President Day (why do all of our Canadian holidays have to land on a US holiday?!), so Yuan had the day off. We visited Sonoma, which is a much more chilled and laid-back wine region compared to Napa. It was a really gorgeous day, sunny, blue skies. Even though we got there around noon, we managed to visit about 5 or 6 wineries. Everything was close together, and they all offered walk-in tasting. It seems picnicking is a popular thing to do there. A lot of wineries have picnic areas with tables and such, sell complete picnic trays or at least bread and cheese, and some even sell wine by the glass to go with the meal. The town centre is also very small and quaint, and reminds me of Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Tuesday we visited the Japan town in San Jose (really small), and then ended up spending most of the afternoon at Mike’s San Jose office. We dropped by to say hi and they took us to lunch at this hole-in-the-wall Mexican place called Maria Elenas’s Taqueria. Then Mike got scheduled for a meeting after lunch (because the organizer didn’t know he was there on vacation), and then we ended up staying for a coworker’s 10 year anniversary celebration. I realize the people and the culture at the San Jose office is quite different from the Waterloo office, when some of the trivia questions they were asking the guy included ones like “Which bar were we kicked out of”, to which the reply was “Which one are you looking for, there were a couple”.
Wednesday, Mike wanted to visit the California Academy of Sciences museum, which was located in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It just happens that there’s free admission on the third Wednesday of every month, so we thought we were in luck. It was another really beautiful day, even in San Francisco, so we figured that was why the park was so insanely crowded. Then we drove by the museum and saw the lineup. We weren’t able to even find the end of the line, it was insane. We were later told by a local that it was typical of SF, and we should line up at 7 am if we wanted to check it out… So of course we left, and headed up to Point Reyes instead, which was north of SF past the Golden Gate bridge. The GPS took us on a path away from the coast, so we decided to take a side road that ended up being ridiculously narrow and winding. There were many a cyclist using that road for training. We didn’t end up going up to Point Reyes after all, since we were low on gas, and just took Hwy 1 back to the city, stopping by Stinson Beach along the way. That stretch of Hwy 1 is also very nice, and there were many places to stop and watch the sunset.
Thursday we headed up to Napa for more wineries. In Napa, it seems that a lot of the places require you to sign up for a tour and tasting ahead of time. Mike picked Jarvis Winery, which was really unique in that the entire winery (excluding the actual plant life of course) was located in a giant man-made cave under a mountain. Everything from the barrels, offices, washrooms, labs, even a ballroom was underground. They even had an underground creek and waterfall in the middle. We weren’t allowed to take photos though. The tour included tasting of 6 different wines, paired with cheese and crackers. They were very generous with their pours and afterwards I was so done for the day. At like $75 minimum per bottle, I didn’t want to waste anything! We then swung by Cakebread to pick up a bottle of chardonnay (at like half the price it was selling for at the LCBO), but I had absolutely no interest in tasting anything else. We then checked into our hotel at Yountville. We stayed at Bardessono, a relatively new, green-focused luxury hotel that was really nice. Call it our delayed Valentine getaway.
Friday morning, we had a really good breakfast at the hotel (which was included), and walked around Yountville. The town is tiny, but is home to a couple of world class restaurants. We checked out the French Laundry, which you have to book 60 days in advanced, and are booked within an hour of when the booking window opens. Heh, definitely for very special occasions. We were originally planning a half day ski on Friday, but Mike wanted to shop at the Napa Premium Outlets instead. So we ended up going to Cabol’s place in Folsom in the evening, to head up to Lake Tahoe in one car.
Saturday, we skied Squaw Valley. It was a little crowded, not a lot of fresh snow, and there wasn’t a lot of more off-piste areas. Their lift tickets are pretty cool though. They started using tickets with rfid in them, so you can just walk through the gates without having someone scan them. In theory anyways. Ended up humping the gates a few time to get it detected.
Sunday, we headed back to San Francisco to try and visit the Academy of Science museum again. It was grey and rainy, so we were surprised to find the park filled to capacity with cars again. What gives? They crowd the park when it’s sunny, they crowd the park when it’s rainy… There was a lot of people at the museum, maybe it’s a popular rain day activity. The museum was fairly interesting, it had a planetarium, aquarium, and a rain forest in one building. However, I felt the content was kinda lacking.
We took a red-eye flight back to Toronto Sunday night. The security at SFO was so very, very laxed. They didn’t care about carry-on limits, they barely even looked at our stuff in the scanner. One last interesting note, we arrived at Pearson around 6 am Monday morning. Leaving the custom area, we saw this group of kids in odd clothing getting a tour of the airport. It turns out they were the kids from that floating school that sank near Brazil. As we were waiting for our ride, we saw all these reporters and camera people running frantically back and forth. As soon as they see any orange-clad kid (some of them were wearing life vests, carrying life preservers), they would chase them down and snap photos. So I took photos of them, humph, see how they feel.
Then we took a nap and drove back to Waterloo. Where I then shovelled like a foot of snow off the driveway. Yay Canada!
Some photos on Facebook:
Set 1
Set 2
Tagged: Travels
Comments (2)
Ahaha getting booked for a meeting is awesome. I’m never visiting work on vacation in the future.
Heh, well I also shipped a couple of packages to his work.. sooo…
© Maggie Tam 2007-2009 www.onechopstick.ca
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