Pacific Coastal Cruise Travelogue #6

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Travelogue - Day 7
San Francisco, CA

Hello everyone! -

Thursday, September 24, 2009

We arrived in foggy San Francisco this morning. After grabbing a quick breakfast, we headed off the ship to our tour bus for the Sonoma wine country. The fog stayed with us most of the morning and finally broke up at least an hour out of San Francisco. As we passed along the two lane road heading out to our first vineyard, we passed acres and acres of grape vines laden full with rich, ripe grapes ready for the picking. This is actually grape picking season - so most of the vineyards are quite busy gearing up for a great season and creating some delicious wines.

We passed through the small square in Sonoma and headed out further to the oldest vineyard in the area, Buena Vista since 1857 founded by an Hungarian immigrant Augoston Haraszthy. He is referred to as the Father of California Viticulture. The tour guide dropped us off in the parking lot and we walked about a couple of hundred yards away from where we were greeted along the side of the dirt road at a wooden stand. One of the owners of the vineyard was there and was pouring a few different varieties of wine. We were under the enormous eucalyptus trees that lined the property - some which had tree trunks as large as six feet across. There were also blossoming crape myrtle trees in full bloom, which gave some nice magenta color to the area.

We walked down to the “vault” where we could look inside and see the enormous barrels of wine and where the temperature was a cool 56-57°. The wine was stored there because it is cool inside there. The building was made of rock and clay with very thick walls and a dirt floor keeping the temperature contant.

Our next stop was at an area called Cornerstone where we tasted several wines from three different tasting rooms as opposed to wineries. Each room had several wines that we could taste and we liked a few of them and purchased a couple for our wine rack. We had never heard of them, Rochambo and The Grange.

The tour driver then took us back into the Sonoma Square where we only had 45 minutes for lunch and had to get back on the bus headed to the ship. Lunch found us at the Sonoma Cheese Factory where we enjoyed some nice sandwiches.

We were back in San Francisco at 3:00 and the ship left port in the thick fog at 3:30. We had no cell service or internet service while we were in San Francisco. Once we passed under the Golden Gate bridge (that we could barely see the bottom of as we passed under it) we were headed out to the Pacific Ocean and headed south towards our next port of call in Catalina.

The Euchre tournament continued - and the guys are still dominating - much to the gals dismay. We heard the ship’s fog horn all during the night, indicating that the fog had not let up.

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