Skiing in Telluride!

I went to Telluride with Kristin, Nancy (Momma Mia) and Carol mainly for a girls trip and wedding planning for Kristin's wedding there in July. However, the snow was so great, we got a lot of skiing in as well! I don't think I've ever skiied on such great snow - so powdery and PERFECT consistency - I loved it! The views that we saw on the 2nd day when it cleared up were amazing too - what a great trip! I'm looking forward to going back in July - FUN!

Wine Tasting like on "Sideways"

If you've seen the movie Sideways, then you may recognize some of the places we visited on our wine tasting weekend in the Santa Ynez Valley. We did a two-day trip and had a great time with good wines, food and company. We renamed each of the wineries that we visited and I thought I'd share these with you here, so maybe you can get some smiles out of them too. I'll also give my wine recommendations from this trip. As a note on this area, many of the wines here are French style wines because these grapes grow very well in this region as they do in France. We sampled a lot of Pinot Noirs, which are usually not my favorites, but were quite good from this region. The stronger Cabernets that Scott and I usually enjoy were not very good in this region, but the stronger Syrahs were very nice.









- Bridlewood (Dualing Horses) was the first winery that we visited and I wasn't overly impressed with any of the wines there.
- Rusack (Flowery Diamond) had a Pinot Noir (Santa Barbara County) that had a food flavor taste to it. :D
- Rideau (A Cajun Winery) had a wine called a Lagniappe Red (2005) that I really enjoyed. However, it was pretty pricey, so we didn't get any. The owner of this winery is from New Orleans and apparently they have certain days where she cooks food for everyone who comes to taste - too bad we missed out on that!
- Buttonwood (Retard or Doodle) had a very nice and intelligent guy named Bobby who served us some of our wines. I wasn't a fan of the whites here or even most of the reds, but they had a red Bordeaux called Trevin (2002) that we liked a lot. This is a mixture of their other 3 reds and this wine definitely shows some synergy (thanks, Collen!) The Cabernet Franc that was 35% of this mixture was renamed Tombstone Delight with a hint of Graveyard by us due to the earthyness (this was close to the end of our first day, by the way). They also had a 2003 Hawk Red that got a smiley based on my rating system. :)
- Kalyra (Malaria) wasn't one of our favorites. For one thing, the wine is all grown, made and bottled in Australia and then brought over here, so it didn't quite fit in with the area tastes that we were experiencing.
- Sunstone (Stoned sun) was our last winery of the first day and by far our favorite for this day. They had a very nice 2004 Syrah SBC and an even better 2005 Rapsodie du Soleil. The Rapsodie was 89% of the before-mentioned Syrah, but was even better with some Grenache, Mourvedre and Viognier added in. This winery had a great feel, as well as a guy with a guitar singing outside with a beautiful voice.













For dinner on the first night, we visited the Hitching Post, which was a favorite hangout in the movie Sideways. They are known for their steaks and steaks we did have! You can see some pictures here, including one very large piece of meat on the grill, but unfortunately this one didn't come to our table. We had a very nice time at this restaurant and found a very interesting hair do! I think a couple of names were thrown around for him, including Unicorn and Hair Island. There was a nice group of people at the table next to us making faces in our pictures, so I decided to take a picture of them and include on the blog because they were part of our experience! The girl in the middle on the left, we decided looked like Tina Fey and the guy in the middle on the right looked like our friend Alex. We named the guys Manboobs (I'm forgetting why now). Hi guys! Hope you enjoyed your trip as much as we did!










We didn't visit as many wineries on the second day, but they were all high quality for sure.
- Fess Parker (Davey Crockett) had some very nice wines, including a 2005 Chardonnay "American Tradition Reserve" that we liked a lot. We're not usually big fans of white wine, but this one was very nice - not too sweet. There were a couple of Pinot Noirs, the "Santa Barbara County" one we didn't really like, but the 2005 "American Tradition Reserve one was very good. Scott liked this one the most, but I liked even better the 2004 "The Big Easy" Syrah. It is named this because of its big dense taste, which I enjoyed very much. Although it was very dense, it wasn't overly tannony and finished quite well. They also had a very nice Syrah called "Rodney's Vinyard". Many smileys on this winery's sheet! :D
- Zaca Mesa (Storm Fields) was recommended to us by friends before going and we appreciated the recommendation. This winery just qualified for sustainable status, which means that they are growing in a more environmentally friendly way. They had a 2005 Roussanne, which was a white wine that we enjoyed very much. I guess Alex and Kris brought one to our Thanksgiving gathering because it went so well with turkey, but I missed out on that on Thanksgiving. We bought a bottle, though so I'll have to make another turkey just to enjoy this wine with! They also had a 2004 Estate Z Three, which is a blend of Syrah, Moervedre and Grenache that was excellent.
- Foxen (Rusty Anchor) was a cute winery right off the road and with a nice, rustic feel, but although our friends enjoyed the wine here a lot, we didn't love any of it.


- Our last winery was by far our favorite over the two days. Andrew Murray Vineyards usually just tastes their wines at a tasting room in town, but they had a special open house while we were there out in their wine warehouse with a lot of wine to taste, great food to munch on and live music that I really loved. And the best part... is that Andrew Murray was one of the people pouring our wine and answering our questions! He was incredibly nice and knew a lot about wine and impressed us all. He wasn't at all cocky and even allowed our group to go back and take a picture with him. I give this winery 5 stars! :D All of the wines here were extremely good, including the many Syrahs that we tasted. I think the best value was the 2005 Central Coast Syrah. For only $16, this had a lot of taste. Probably our other favorite was the 2005 Brave Oak Syrah. There was one extra not on the tasting list that was absolutely awesome and even rocked Josh's world, as he said. Andrew Murray was happy to hear this one, though a little shocked by the wording. :D This one was called a Watch Hill Syrah if I'm remembering correctly and it was probably on of the best ones we tasted on the whole trip.


We also visited the town of Solvang, which is designed like a little Danish town. We had a nice breakfast and I got a goofy picture with a Danish shoe. :D

Joshua Tree

I had never been to Joshua Tree and decided I've lived here for far too long without visiting this famous park. It was just Scott and I who went and the trip ended up being very short because both of us were a bit sick, but it was really fun to see the park! I love all of the Joshua Trees everywhere - it looks like they're waving to you everywhere you go. They have so much energy and character and all are so different - what a world. We hiked into 49 Palms, an oasis in the middle of the desert. It's totally crazy to see all of the green palms in the middle of complete brown desert - super cool. While hiking around, you can occasionally catch a bit of color as well, like in some cacti. We didn't expect it to get very cold because the weather channel predicted lows of 51, but it was definitely around 40 or below while we tried to sleep - quite nippy! We had planned to do some climbing on the second day, but our sickness got to us and we had to be happy with watching others climbing. You can see people on top of one of the rocks in this post if you look carefully.

Channel Islands - Anacapa

We went up to the Channel Islands off the coast of Ventura/Santa Barbara last weekend and visited and camped on Anacapa Island. I didn't even know these islands existed until Marie, my new French friend asked if I wanted to go. Funny how it takes someone from half a world away to make us realize what's in our own back yards. On the boat ride over, there were lots of dolphins jumping all around us and chasing our boat to be playful. We also had a sea gull following the boat, showing us a preview of things to come. Note - some of the best pictures I will show were taken by Marie, so I need to give her the credit (the sea gull is just one of them).










Once on the island, we immediately realized that we would be surrounded by sea gulls. There were hundreds of thousands of them all over the island with their cute young ones.









There were some really beautiful views all over the island as well.


















We camped for a night with only 2 other groups of people, but we were not lonely because of all the birds. They settled down at night, but woke up and started making plenty of noise at about 5AM. If you want to get an idea of the sounds, take a look at the video below.









We went snorkeling because we had heard that was supposed to be really good here. One thing it definitely was was cold! The water was probably close to 60 degrees - even very cold in a full wet suit. We did get to swim with tons of kelp forests and sea lions! The underwater pictures are not the best quality, but the one of the sea lion looking up at me is my favorite - so cute! Okay, the one of Marie is cute too (see Scott in the background completely freezing without a wet suit!) You can hear the sea lions in the background in the video and should be able to see them in one of the island shot pictures.








Birds and sea lions were not the only creatures on the island - I had to include my masterpiece picture of the ladybug with perfect colors - I'm not bragging or anything. ;-)









We were supposed to catch the 11:30AM boat back to the mainland, but there was a communication error and the boat left without us. We had to wait 4 hours for the next one, but no worries. We read, I snorkeled again and ... I took a little nap.








The company was so sorry about their mishap that they gave us a full refund of our whole trip! A very fun weekend and now I want to visit more of these islands.