Wines, Dines, and Celebrity Sightings!

We left Sacramento in the early morning to head toward San Francisco. On our way to San Fran though, we were going to take a pit stop in Napa Valley to check out California wine country and see some of the vineyards. Kelsey was the tour guide for Napa and as we were about ten minutes away, she was still googling places on her phone of where to go and what to tour. Turns out, her Google search ran upon the "O'Brien Estate." Rated one of the top 10 best things to do in Napa Valley, the privately owned local winery is operated by Bart O'Brien, a software tycoon and billionaire who decided to get into the wine business for fun. To schedule tours, you have to call his cell phone. So, that's what we did. We called him up about 15 minutes from his house and he invited us over for a tour of the place. When we arrived, we were greeted by our tour guide, Joe, who took us throughout the vineyard explaining the process of making wine from start to finish. Now, since our family is rather uneducated on wine, it made for a truly educational experience as we got to go out into the vineyard and actually try all of the grapes of the different flavors, all at different stages of the process. Our private tour then took us through what happens to wines once they are harvested and how wine is created, and also the difference between blend wines, pure wines, how color is given to the wines and how many people are involved in the wine-making process. Pretty fascinating actually. Fun Fact: there are thousands of different factors that go into what makes a wine have a specific taste. If one vine is shaded by a tree, or affected by a slighting different wind pattern than the vine next to it, taste can be altered. Also, wine color is decided by the skins of the grapes used in them. Who knew?

So needless to say, the Tate family was thoroughly impressed by the O'Brien Estate, so much that Dad even joined their wine club! However, after our photo-ops and spending some more quality time meeting Mr. O'Brien himself, we had to hit the road again. Flash-forward another hour or so and we were approaching San Francisco from the mainland. It was about time for a late lunch, so Dad took us to Sausalito which is a coastal town on the way to San Fran that overlooks the bay. Kelsey whipped out her Google skills once more to find us a restaurant to dine in, and we found the Horizons diner which was a lovely bay-side sit-down place with great seafood and a gorgeous view of the Golden Gate and city. Sausalito reminds me of a small coastal village on the east coast, where the locals are shrimpers or other fishermen and a few gift shops line the main street to catch tourists but also mixed with a bit of Spanish architecture and flare.

After lunch, we took a windy mountain road nearby to stop off at Muir National Park, which is part of the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. Muir Woods, as it's also known is home to giant redwood trees and wonderful hiking trails. Although our family isn't much into hiking all together, we decided to take a 1-2.5 mile hiking trail up through the forest and check out some of these massive redwoods that tower over the woodland floor below. Some of these trees, well over a few hundred years old are over an entire football field tall (For our British viewers - that'd be American Football...:-))!! We stumbled upon some baby fawns grazing, so I got some great pictures of them next to the trail, and our family had a great time taking photos inside some of these massive trees as well as along the paths and bridges too.

Following our family-time with nature, we headed back to society over the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco! We drove through the city and located our old-timey hotel (it may or may not have survived the famous earthquake of 1906) to check in and get settled. Although the hotel was a little sketchy, by the fact that it had an old school elevator that creaked really bad, and had the door that you opened up to step in it (it felt like a laundry chute) as well as the paper thin walls with all sorts of interesting and scary people living there - things were great :-) You can imagine, in these conditions we also were without internet to let you all know how we were doing too. Yet, after dropping our bags - we decided to find some local grub and just a block down the street was a famous little restaurant known as "Tommy's Joynt." Dad saw this restaurant on the travel channel or something and was dying to go there, so we tagged along and went to check this place out. At Tommy's, you basically order like you're in a high school cafeteria and they slop your food on a plate before you go find a seat somewhere. Except, unlike the mystery meats of our younger years, this food is the west coast version of soul food and quality home cookin'. Mom and I got bbq brisket, Dad conquered the enormous plate of spare ribs. Kelsey (per usual - the skinny one in our family) had a quaint baked potato, but either way - this place was pretty awesome. Lastly, not only did we enjoy some great grub but we had our first family celebrity sighting too! When we walked in the restaurant, mom swears that one of the Wayan Brothers is sitting at the bar across the room from us. The rest of our family, didn't really pay much attention, other than the fact that the guy at the bar had a pretty familiar face - but we couldn't figure out from what. Mom insisted that we all try to find out who he was, so naturally we all went to our phones and tried to race to determine who the mystery man was. To make matters worse, we got seated right beside the guy after getting our food, which made our search more painfully obvious and taking pictures of him way less discrete. Kelsey got one really dark and blurry photo of the guy, but the entire dinner Dad and her eased dropped on the conversation and still couldn't figure out who the man was. Anyhow, to make a long story longer - we found out later that night that we were sitting next to David Alan Grier, who won a Tony Award on Broadway, was on the show "In Living Color," Dancing with the Stars, and is in a bunch of other random films, shows, and things you'd recognize him from - but isn't your A-list celebrity. (He was in Jumanji for example - as the cop) Well, our family was stoked, it doesn't take much to make our evening worthwhile.

We caught some shut eye and that was it for our first night in San Fran, in the morning we were going to see Alcatraz and explore more of the city itself. So - here's the play list you should be updated as well.

Sacramento - "Hotel California" ~The Eagles
Muir Woods - "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" ~Spamalot Soundtrack
Sausalito - "Down by the Bay" ~Raffi
San Francisco - "Come Monday" ~Jimmy Buffett
Napa Valley - "Red, Red Wine" ~UB40