wine tasting with an old friend in Napa Valley

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It is a surreal and beautiful experience to meet up with friends from home whilst you’re travelling overseas. We have been lucky enough to share our journeys and experiences with many of our dear Australian friends.

We gatecrashed Rohan and Jodie's holiday on the last week of their honeymoon in Phuket. We had a trashy and good ol’ catch up with Libana and Mel in Amsterdam. We travelled for an amazing 3 weeks with Jamie and Richard to Cardiff, London and Barcelona. We shared many London experiences with Aaron’s mum Anne and his nan, and also a beautiful weekend in Paris. We caught up with Ross over a trashy night out in London and also a quiet night, both unsurprisingly involving gin. We met Anne-Marie at her half-way point around the world in London and shared debaucherous travel stories. We were shown round Cambridge by Litty and met her lovely boyfriend Ben. We were taken in and welcomed by Aaron’s relatives Dennis, Eyrun, Clare and Jakob in Iceland. We even met up with a travel friend Adam we had made back in Vienna, who showed us his home town in Washington DC. We most recently played with Brent and Kim in LA and Disneyland.

It was now our last chance to share our journey with an old friend, this time with my old high school friend Yeumee. She moved to San Francisco earlier this year to work as a veterinarian in San Jose, about an hour south of San Francisco. She kindly welcomed us into her home at lush Mountain View, and we met her housemates Suzanne and Ross, and would meet her other housemate Annie when she got back from interstate.

Staying at Yeumee’s place was great for two reasons. Obviously, it was incredibly generous of her and her housemates to let us crash there for a few nights, and to experience the luxuries of a house that one does not have whilst ‘living’ in hostels - such as continuous streaming of NCIS on cable TV, a kitchen with a refrigerator and cupboards that actually contain edible objects within, and a comfortable bed to sleep on without getting disturbed in the morning by other backpackers rustling about crinkling their plastic bags to catch their 5am flights.

But perhaps the most rewarding aspect about staying with her was to get a first-hand account of what it’s like to uproot oneself and re-locate to another country, without really knowing what is in store. And how to do that successfully, which Yeumee has most definitely done. She is in a beautiful house with lovely housemates, has a great job and has made so many friends in the short amount of time that she has been there.

It really gives us hope for Vancouver.

Yeumee had a couple of days off from work whilst we stayed with her, so we decided to take the opportunity to go wine-tasting in the Napa Valley, about 3 hours from where she lived. Many of us have gone wine-tasting in the Hunter Valley once or twice (who can forget Matt’s unforgettable birthday celebration last year with that especially unforgettable character Joey…) but this was a totally different experience. The road takes you along the rugged coastline of northern California, past lonely lagoons and craggy clifftops and secluded beaches. Turning east inland into lush valleys of grapevines and short olive trees, silhouetted against the garish blue skies by the swelteringly hot Californian sun. It truly is reminiscent of what some call ‘paradise’.

We treated ourselves to a cheap motel, tasty antipasto and cheese platters, delicious wine and good company. And we actually learnt how to taste wine properly. I used to get embarrassed when waiters came up to me and allowed me to taste a drop of the wine I had ordered, and I would just sip it and go “yes, that is fine, good sir” even though it may taste of burning human flesh or putrefied dried fish (and yes I have tasted the latter). But now I know to raise it to the light (preferably daylight) to test the clarity of the wine; to shove my nose deep into the glass to smell its aromas; to swirl it around and taste for sweetness/flavour/bite/ripeness; and to make up random but exotic sounding names for what I taste such as “the sweet pizzazz of raspberry infused with a slight oak flavour of the 1993 variety”.

All in all, a great mid-week escape from the mega-tropolis cities we’ve been inhabiting for the last month or so.

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Comments

[Elise]

oh wow how relaxing that experience looks!! looks like grteat wheather to =) Miss you both heaps!!! xXx