Old Friends, Good Wine

One plus of a road trip is being able to stop when and where we want, see friends, make a detour, eat in a restaurant or in the RV, turn around and go back home.

Once I knew that I had to go to San Francisco for some claim work it made sense to come on up to the Petaluma area. There was a wine pickup party at Armida, a winery which we belong to and I wanted a couple of cases of Poison anyway for the road trip.

Some of the pickup parties can be quite fun, with wine associated games while wine tasting. This one had music and food. Unfortunately, little of the food was gluten free so I could only eat the meat. Then bees swarmed the chicken so that we were dancing, not to the music, but to moving from the bees. But it gave us a chance to try some other wines than we normally buy and have a little food in the vineyard.

From the vineyard we stopped at REI, likely the last visit to the store, to pick up last minute items for the upcoming backpacking trips.

We have friends in Santa Rosa who we only see when we are passing thru and we arranged to meet for dinner. Jerry and Karen are people we’ve known for years. I met Karen at an AAUW meeting when our farm was going down and they’d been in similar circumstances. Then their daughter and one of our son’s got together and were together for several years. They’ve come to parties of ours and we have been to their place. So when Jerry and Karen moved to Santa Rosa we maintained our friendship, she says that she stalks my Facebook site.

We met for dinner at a wine bar and shared little plates and drank wine. We discussed our upcoming adventure, a move to Canada, and their moving adventures, our kids, and more travels.

Now off to Sonoma and then Oregon.