Not that I actually live on a range of any sort, but I am home again and so, the title of this post sounded good. At first. :)
Anyway, the point is that we're home from our vacation in San Francisco and Napa Valley and I have 311 photos to show for it, all of which, I'll need to sort thru and edit so I can share some of them with you. Notice, I said *some*. Don't worry. I won't make you sit thru all 311 of our vacation photos.
I thought you'd appreciate that.
So the above photo is a pretty decent representation of what we saw of the Golden Gate Bridge during our entire 3 days in San Fran. As in, not much. It was foggy, foggy, foggy.
When we got to California, we spent 2 nights in Napa first. We rode on a fancy train...
....where we ate fancy food.
I fell in love with these trees (the general consensus from the twitter crowd is that it's a crepe myrtle of some sort). We saw them EV. ERY. WHERE. in Napa.
They have these gorgeous bright pink flower clusters on them (though we saw some lavender ones too). Bart has already begun doing some research on them.....it looks like we just might be able to grow one here in our own back yard which would be fabulous! It looks like this tree comes in a dozen or so varieties, one of which is called "cherry razzle-dazzle". I don't know if that's this particular variety or not, but whatever variety we may end up with, I think I still might call it the cherry razzle-dazzle, because any tree called cherry razzle-dazzle sounds like the tree for me!
We also saw lots of grapes in Napa. Weird, right?
For the record, Napa Valley is gorgeous. Gorgeous. Relaxed, slow paced, quaint, cozy.......we had a picnic in Napa and it was honestly one of my favorite meals of the trip.
And then we went back to San Francisco for a few nights. This was our view of the Golden Gate Bridge as we drove over it. Did I mention that it was foggy in San Fran?
When we got to San Francisco, we rode cable cars..... (Did you know they have to manually turn the car around on a rotating platform at the end of the line? This was news to me.)
.......we went to Fisherman's Wharf and ate seafood.....
.....and we saw the Painted Ladies (houses, not actual ladies......that would have been weird). Anyone remember these from the opening credits of Full House?!
We even saw sea lions at Pier 39. Lots of sea lions. I could have watched their crazy antics all day. Sea lions are cranky when they're sleeping and another sea lion climbs over the top of them to get to a new spot. Though I suppose I'd feel the same way, if it were me.
We also drove on the curviest street (Lombard St.), had ice cream at Ghirardelli, went to brunch at Cliff House overlooking the sea, drove on the steepest streets I've ever seen in my life (and they're all over the place in San Fran!), and ate large volumes of fantastic food. I have lots and lots of pictures to share but hopefully these will tide you over for now. :)
Have a wonderful weekend........and for those of you in the US, have a wonderful Labor Day holiday weekend! We're planning to stick close to home. We're in full-on puppy obedience training mode over here! The puppy trainer came again this week and gave us a new list of homework to work on.
smooches,
