First, I received this link from a friend and have to share it - it contains important information for anyone who drinks wine.
http://www.wimp.com/wineshoe
We are at the north end of the Alexander Valley wine region and there are more than 50 wineries within 50 miles of our location in Mendocino....we are working our way through them and they are beautiful! It is amazing to see the miles and miles of vines and the beautiful tasting rooms along Rt 128....from now on it is a requirement to take shoes, just in case.
I am attaching a picture of our motor home which, as you can see is parked next to our deck! And we've planted a bit of an herb garden....with so little sun it is amazing how it is thriving,,,, with the exception of the tender mint basil....you can also see our "curtains" in the front window. We put these up (using the "summer" drapes (read sheets) from our bedroom in Tucson)so that we wouldn't have to open and close the "real" drapes in the rig (they are 10 years old and we wanted to reduce the wear and tear (haha) on them). Pretty fancy!
We continue to explore the parks - hiking the 2 mile trails and working our way up to the 3,4,5,6.....mile trails - there are so many options and so many trails that it is hard to decide where to go. Right outside the Ford House door there are opportunities to walk the headlands and to get onto the beach!
http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=442
The biggest news is that we have found the most amazing pizza ever and it is gluten free - just up the road (about 10 miles) in the Ft. Bragg bakery....they only are open from Wed thru Sun and it's a very good thing - you might have guessed that David is absolutely addicted.
Hope all is well with all of you.....With many hugs, S&D
One day last week I had two people say unintended funny things I’d never heard before. Each one requires a brief story.
First, while volunteering in the Ford House (the visitor center in Mendocino) I got to talking with someone about Glass Beach, which is at the north end of Fort Bragg, the next major town north of Mendocino. It seems that the site of Glass Beach was a nasty dump, but it was cleaned up a few decades ago. The broken, sea polished glass is all that remains, and it makes the beach a destination. We even have a book for sale at the Ford House that tells the story of the dump and how people finally did the right thing. One interesting point mentioned in the book is that certain colors of the glass are more rare than others, especially blue and purple. We speculated a bit on what might have been the source of such colors, and my co-conversationalist suggested incisively that blue was probably from the “milk of amnesia” bottles! (Maybe that’s what you take when you just want forget about the intestinal distress?)
Later in the day I went out to take a look at the work being done to build a tent next to the Ford House for the upcoming Music Festival (see above). The huge tent (16,000 square feet) was about complete, and on this day most of the work had been devoted to assembling the large stage. As I looked down the inclined field toward the tent with the stage at the lower end, I really thought the stage was pitched toward me, but I wasn’t sure. So I turned to ask one of the workers sitting at a picnic bench nearby about it. “Is the stage level?” I asked. He answered yes, it was. I went on to say that it sure looked like it was pitched, but he said no, that it was really just an “optical delusion”! Meaning you fooled yourself into seeing it?
It is possible that they really didn’t say what I heard, but this is way funnier I think! Or are we just getting too old to know what in the world is going on.....
BTW – Yesterday we sat for a couple of hours in the big tent listening to a really good big band rehearse for their Music Festival performance, and we just loved it. The really special treat was a young pianist, who we thought was just fantastic. Turns out he is only 22, and the son of the band leader and the classical pianist who founded the festival. His name is Julian Waterfall Pollack (his mom is Susan Waterfall), and he is making a splash (no pun intended) in the NYC jazz world. He has a new album, Infinite Playground. Check it out!
The Music Festival draws folks from all over the world - performers and attendees....some famous, some not......been going on for 23 years and there are, on average, 3 performances each day for 20 days - it's really amazing for this town of 900 residents!!! There is a theater, many art galleries, a wonderful art center and on and on...."unique" is not even in the running for a descriptive.
Up dating the day-to-day....
We were in Reno, NV this past week getting a new license plate for our 2000 Honda and new drivers licenses - had to make this hurry-up trip as the bank wouldn't allow us to open an account, all of our addresses didn't match and we don't have any utility bills (whoops) - me thinks they were suspicious that we wanted to launder money.... when, really all we wanted to do was to launder our dirty clothes and that's another story - it's at least 8 miles to the closest laundromat.
Mendocino is super - foggy much of the time, but when the sun comes out the blue blue sky and the blue blue ocean become one...the trees are awesome, some the height of a 20 story building and more....and the green, the green makes you weep.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
The Fourth of July in this really small town (pop. 900) drew tons of people to the parade - we were "on duty" at the Ford House all morning then at about noon we locked the door and went outside to help with the hot dog sale (we sold 400 - quite the feat given the resources) until the parade started at 1:00.
People had been parking their pickups and flat beds and putting out their folding chairs on Main Street all night and in the morning brought kegs of beer and other party paraphernalia along with with grand parents, kids, cousins and friends to take their places. We had been told that in past years there were times when the parade went around twice, but this year it only happened with one float - the nastiest one in the parade - covered in sea weed with dancing girls wearing bikinis that they had tucked sea weed into - came by smelling worse the second time than the first.
The band was terrific, wearing all sorts of hats and other garb....the party went on all afternoon on the Kelly House lawn (another period building) and we went back to greeting people and telling them where to go and what to do and all about the history of the Ford House and the start of the lumber industry - we do tell them about the remorse that was felt by some of the men who found and cut down the thousand year old redwoods - but those guys were few and far between. We are lucky that some state and national parks were created to protect some of these great-grandfather trees - they are so very amazing!
A few pictures of the parade follow. Note that there are causes (like the salmon) here that you don't find everywhere. Also note the water tower in the background across the street from the Ford House - the water table was high, the wind was heavy enough to make the windmills turn - they pulled water up into the tanks on top of the towers and gravity supplied running water to the houses - there were many, many of them in Mendo in the late 1800s!! today they are used for all sorts of things - like guest houses, galleries, etc.
