But, I've gotten ahead of myself. Last week we found ourselves in the extraordinary beautiful Napa Valley. It is home to about a billion (okay, actually 16) micro-climates and is able to grow so many varieties of grapes and make all the wines. And we learned about all of them. No really. We did.
We took off in the wee hours of Wednesday morning with two other couples.
With remarkably smooth travel, we made it to Napa and our home base for the long weekend, the Senza hotel. There were definite pros and cons to this stay, and while we thoroughly enjoyed our trip, I can't say I'd be in a hurry to get back to this particular place. I did like my heated bathroom floors. (and the friend peeking through my window 😜) If I did go back, I'd definitely get a vineyard view room to make it feel a bit more "Napa."
Our first stop was Inglenook, which was such a gorgeous intro to the entire experience. I knew that things would be pretty, but I was not prepared for how stunning just about everywhere we went was.
We had a fabulous dinner at Grace's Table in downtown Napa before kicking it around the fire pit at our hotel enjoying the perfect weather and great company.
We scheduled our hot air balloon ride on the first morning to coincide with our slight jet lag. There was fog in the valley, so we didn't end up flying directly above Napa, but instead a little down the road above the city of Winters and their fruit and nut orchards. But we did FLY!!!! I had warned our whole party that our bad luck might hold, but we had the most lovely flight, and it did live up to all of my hot air balloon dreams.
Somehow, we thought we were going to be cold, because they had warned us to bring layers. What I had missed is that it would regularly be about 90 degrees in the basket due to the gigantic flames above our head. So we were plenty warm. 🤣 It really was so peaceful to drift along, catching the wind and learning how it all works.
Crazy enough, there were 22 people in this balloon. I had no idea the baskets were that large. Everything looks so different from above and getting another perspective on the world was mesmerizing.
Once we got down, we had a fantastic brunch that was a sleeper favorite of the trip. I'm trying to spare us all the myriad food pics I took, but we were really impressed and highly recommend Balloons Above the Valley. From there, we were picked up by our driver for the rest of our stops that day, which included Chateau Montelena, a historic and beautiful property with a fascinating history detailed in the movie Bottle Shock. (which I have still not watched 😬, but I've seen a lot of baseball in the past couple of weeks).
While there, John and I got a 1981 bottle of Chardonnay (our birth year) that we are planning to save for our 40th birthday - such a fun souvenir! They had to go on quite the hunt to find one they were allowed to sell us, but they did. Afterwards, we had lunch at SolBar, which had a power outage while we were there. That did not affect their ability to serve us super awesome chilled food.
Our final stop of the day was at Castello di Amorosa. Castles are always a good idea. We loved the tour and the tasting and the grounds.
For our second dinner, we went to Celadon which did not disappoint. We dressed up a little, but could not manage to all look at the same camera at the same time.
Napa has SO MANY options for eating and drinking and seeing. We just scratched the surface! Our first two days were amazing, and it was such a joy to experience with dear friends.
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