Wineries

During all those years in Sacramento (25 of them) we thought of wine country as the traditional Napa Sonoma counties. Of course we knew there were grapes in the San Joaquin valley, but thought of them as  table grapes. I even seem to remember boycotting them for the farmworkers! But now there are some toity toity wineries in Lodi, and we did get up to Amador County while we were still in Sacramento and had some yummy zinfandel. There are west side of the San Joaquin Valley wineries, notably Paso Robles, which have some of my favorites, and then on down through SLO and Santa Barbara, of "Sideways" fame. When we were in Washington we discovered there are well-thought-of wineries there, and also in Oregon, but I have to say for the most part they aren't hunky wines.

Surprise surprise, there are wineries galore in San Diego County. Escondido itself has an old winery called Ferrara, been around since 1932. We had mixed results from buying wine there, but the port was yummy. Then there's Temecula, the town near where Mike grew up in Elsinore. They have a wine trail there, with 35 or so wineries with tasting rooms, and probably restaurants at most of them. Food is good -- we just took our second jaunt up there for lunch. Apparently 1984 was a significant year in the development of the area as wine country. And then there are wineries in Fallbrook and down the road to Rancho Bernardo and beyond. These turn out to be the drives we want to take. The heck with walking trails -- those are usually so hilly, have so much elevation!

The Bernardo Winery claims to have been founded in 1889! But I read that Napa had it's first official winery in 1859.

Just some random info before I pour my second glass.

Kitchen as home

It's taken me a long time to absorb that one of my major pleasures is cooking. Not cooking as in coming up with a meal two or three times a day -- I still wouldn't really like that. But I like putting together meals now that we have evolved (or devolved?) into people who will just as easily go out for a bite than to eat at home. And especially since I no longer live under the pressure to provide meat at every meal! Gosh it takes a long time to un-train a man from the eating assumptions he grew up with.

So now that it's not an expectation, as in "When are we going to have dinner," which has turned into the more recent "Do you have anything in mind for dinner," I find it enjoyable to make up a meal. The reason it's enjoyable is that I've done the work beforehand, either by shopping for the quick-to-fix, or by noodling around in the kitchen and cooking in bulk -- soup, roasted vegetables, stuff like that -- so that there are things on hand. It's the noodling around, or the puttering, that I've just now recognized as parallel to my spouse's puttering in the garden. It's meditative.

And I have a nice kitchen here in Avocado Land. Plenty of counter space, almost enough cupboard space (is there ever enough?) and the freaking big refrigerator of my dreams with a large freezer drawer on the bottom. For the last couple of years we've also had food from our own garden, which Mike produced with his own puttering (which often looked like hard work). But this year he's taking a break. The garden is two miles away, and always needs water (we are in Southern California, remember?), and takes too much of his time away from his other love, painting. He'll do herbs in pots here at the condo instead.

So we're going to try something new to us -- CSA, or Consumer Supported Agriculture. I know a lot of people do this -- it's very cool -- but I couldn't make use of it when we had a garden. So, we'll pay for a quarter of a year at a time, and get a box of whatever is in season, weekly or bi-weekly. We'll start with bi-weekly and see how it goes. I like the idea of planning meals depending on what shows up in our box.

Just another part of the food game.

The road to everywhere

We've returned from a month on a Caribbean island that became our usual place to escape the ice, snow, and the frequent cold wind and rain of Western Washington. Sometimes we barely made it out ahead of weather that would have trapped us. One year the Bellingham airport closed and they sent us on a bus to Seattle. Once we came back to that sort of weather, again took a bus that took seven hours to get us the 100 or so miles home.

This year when we left for Bequia it was 80 degrees in Escondido. Bequia was pretty humid, besides being in the 80s temperature-wise. (Hot flashes didn't help.) Still gorgeous, still culturally entertaining, still friends there we've met before and enjoyed, still that crisp and cold Hairoun beer that tastes so good after a walk to lunch, sitting on a patio overlooking the harbor.

But not a relief from home. When we got home it was around 75 degrees. It's arid here, and my hair quits frizzing like it does in the tropics. And I have no complaints.

What this seems to mean is that traveling is now for its own sake, not to escape something. We still want to go back to Bequia, and other Caribbean spots, perhaps next winter. Bequia is a wonderful place, and feels like a second home now that we've stayed there five times. And there are other islands to revisit, and new ones to see for the first time. But Restless Barb is looking for other parts of the world and our own country to explore, any time of year. And then to come home, any time of year.

And here's the deal. If I want I can catch a bus on the street outside my home and link to connections anywhere in the world. So I will never feel trapped here, at home, in Southern California.

Where is home?

[Just discovered that I never posted these first two entries. They were written shortly after we moved back to Southern California, almost two years ago.]

They say you can't go home again, but I seem to have done just that. Technically I've landed two counties south of where I began life, but Escondido is more the place of my childhood than Altadena, the neighborhood I grew up in. It is in fact the place of my mother's childhood, and when I was young we often drove the two and a half hours south for holiday gatherings and weeks in the summer to the property here that had been farmed by my grandfather. When we visited, the place was divided between two of my mother's sisters, and populated by my older cousins, whom I idolized. My parents acquired a smaller piece in the middle, where we camped, and I still have access to that piece because my brother is there. It's probably true that I wouldn't find home in Altadena, unless I could take back the actual house that my father built when I was a baby, and where I stayed until it was time for college, and where my wedding took place.

Sacramento didn't seem so far, and it was home in its way, with family life and working life, for twenty-five years. Too dreary in the winter, with fog clamping a chill lid on us for weeks at a time, so that we had to drive forty miles up the Sierras to get a glimpse of the sun.

What made us think we would be satisfied moving north instead of south when retirement arrived? We told ourselves that Southern California, 400 miles down that lonesome stretch of I-5 through the San Joaquin Valley, had changed too much was too crowded now, too many people and too much traffic and too much sprawl. Instead we moved 800 miles north.

In Washington we lived on an acre in the country for a time. I remember for the first six months or so, driving through exquisite countryside between distinct towns -- towns that had actual edges to them -- I would say to myself, "Oh, I wish I could live in a place like this." And then I would remember, "I do!"

Eventually we were snugged up in a place with a view of a bay, almost to the Canadian border.

Beautiful, green, never hot and rarely warm enough. And wet. Living in rainy country is the price you pay for all that sumptuous verdant landscape.

I never guessed that there would be an actual kinesthetic sense to confirm that this place now is home. At first I only noticed I'm satisfied somehow, in a way that I haven't been for a long time. Then I identified the contrasting sense, the one I realize I've had while living so far north, of being perched, ready to fly at any time. We did fly in the winter, to escape the cold. Now that's not necessary. Now we fly away to see other places, but the weather at home is at least as inviting.

Home at last

[Just discovered that I never posted these first two entries. They were written shortly after we moved back to Southern California, almost two years ago.]

It's been a total surprise that this sort of change has happened in my life. Our lives. Over 44 years ago we left Southern California, where we both grew up. First there was a long work-related stay in Sacramento, and then we headed way north to eighteen years of retirement in "The Fourth Corner," snugged up against the Canadian border in Western Washington. Why we did not communicate to each other that this latitude is where we wanted to be again, I'm not sure. Probably because we hadn't articulated it to ourselves. I should have known. There were times when I wondered what I would do if I found myself alone. I always ended up here in my mind.

There was another reason, I suppose, and this is what makes me question the trajectory of our human lives. Sometimes we think too much, but we don't think again about what we thought in the first place. When retirement came, we told ourselves that Southern California was too crowded and too expensive. We made up our minds too fast.

I'm second generation California both sides of the family. In Washington I announced that with a fist in the air and the challenge to "live with it." Washingtonians are suspicious of Californians. They don't understand that most Californians are from somewhere else. Mike was born in Washington, but grew up a ways up old Highway 395 in Lake Elsinore from where we are now.

Now I live in the town where my mother grew up. Grand Avenue is still Grand Avenue, although the hardware store is gone, the one where I used to go when I tagged along with Uncle Paul in his Escondido Water Company truck. The one where every other person we encountered greeted him and asked to be introduced to me. It's harder to get connected without Uncle Paul, but I'm happy to be here.