Location: Sonoma, California
Attractions: Redwoods & Wine

I have been to southern California quite a few times and loved it, so when some good friends of ours wanted to take a trip to wine country, we jumped at the chance. Northern/Central California is a bit different though.

We flew out of Minneapolis and since we had some time to kill at the airport, of course we grabbed some food and a beer! While we were looking over the menu of the restaurant, we couldn’t help but notice an unsteady gal that shoulder checked the restaurant sign as she walked out. Our first thought was, wow, this chick is hammered. She was still in eye sight and we could see her confusingly asking different people about where she needed to go on to get on her flight. When we site down, we began talking to a gentleman that was sitting beside her and he mentioned that she only had half of a Bloody Mary but she had expressed to him that she was scared of flying. Our hunch is that she took some Dramamine along with her vodka drink and the two didn’t mix well. We decided to only have one drink at the bar and got on our flight with no problems.

We started things out in California by crawling in our rental vehicle, a brand new Nissan Armada with just 7 miles on it. We drove it across San Francisco, over the gorgeous Golden Gate Bridge, through wine country, where we picked up some groceries and some In-N-Out Burgers, and headed right into the Redwood Forest to the town of Guerneville. We trekked up a windy road and parked our brand new chariot in the only spot that we could still get out and not ding the doors. The house we stayed in had redwoods all around it. The deck overlooked the valley below and the back patio had a redwood growing out of the middle of it complemented by a hot tub.

There was this cool, Eastern decor thread running through the house. It was very well done and had to all been fairly new. I say this because it all looked new and there was a house fire next door at some point and all that was left was its foundation. Several nearby trees had black scarring from the fire and there was a slight hint of charcoal in the air. We settled in for the night and got some rest for the first official day of play on our vacation.

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