October Anniversary Trip

Diane and I started our anniversary trip Saturday. We spent most of the day traveling... We had a nearly three hour flight from Cleveland to Houston, then another four hour flight to San Francisco. When we got into San Francisco, we picked up our rental car and started to drive North through San Francisco, Oakland, and then on to Fairfield where we are staying for two nights. We made it to Fairfield by 3:00 PM PST and that was time enough to stop at the Budweiser plant and make the last brewery tour of the day.


This is kind of cool since we wrapped up last year's anniversary trip by visiting a Budweiser plant in New Hampshire.

Not only did I get to sample some free Anheuser-Busch products, but I also did some testing of a beer to prove to our class I could tell a fresh beer from a skunky beer. I was awarded with an "Honorary Brewmaster" certificate.



On Sunday, we drove to Napa Valley


Of course, we had to get a self-portrait.


Then we visited something completely awesome that our good friend Laura Jacin recommended to us: Castello di Amorosa


This castle just opened last year and is still being completed. There is way too much to tell you about this place to put into this blog post, so just make sure this is the first place you visit the next time you are in Napa.


All of the brick of the castle has been imported from European areas from other castles and buildings that were being demolished.


This is the "church" room in the castle where our tour began.


This shot of the dining hall turned out pretty good. The room was dark but had some nice window light coming in. For my photographer buddies: I set my camera on a table in the back of the room (did not have a tripod), then set the ISO to 1600, f-stop to f11, and did an exposure length of 1.3 seconds.

Outside on the grounds, the castle has some roosters.

"Hey Rooster.... How's it going? I like your feathers. Say hello to your mother for me."


Most of the grapes have been harvested, but they still had some hanging on the vines in some areas.


A shot of the castle from one of the vineyards.


We checked out a few other places as well, like Cakebread Cellars, but we did not tour them.


We also saw St. Clement Vineyards. For those of you not aware of St. Clement, during the Wedding of Cana when Mary told Jesus that the wedding reception was out of wine, Jesus performed his first miracle and turned water into wine. What you don't know is Clement suggested to Jesus to make really, really good wine since the stuff that they ran out of was mediocre at best. Clement was eventually canonized and made the patron saint of quality wine.

Actually, I made that part up about St. Clement. I checked online to find that there were 10 different Clements that were Canonized and I don't think any of them had anything to do with wine.