Life is for enjoying

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Tish and I had scheduled a day of it this past Sunday.  We were going to randomly pick one of the cards from the SF Walks deck and, well, walk it.  She shows up with some burned cd's and we opted to do a drive from the Bay Area Backroads deck instead.  We decided on driving to Napa and visiting the Niebaum-Coppola Winery.

We couldn't find it.  I must've turned around on 29 about a dozen times.  The best part of the day was finding, out there in the middle of nowhere, a Dean & Deluca.  I thought there was only the one in Soho, but no, out there in the middle-of-nowhere-Napa, was this little slice of grocery heaven.  Luckily I escaped with spending less than $100, but just barely.  We got some deli meat, some cheese, some olives, a baguette, some drinks, and some ridiculously scrumptious desserts.

We looked for a place to have a picnic, but no.  Eventually we gave up and called the number on the Niebaum-Coppola card from the deck.  Turns out they'd renamed it The Rubicon Estate, and we'd driven past it a dozen times.  Bastards.  So we pulled into the drive and were greeted by an attendant who explained how things work.  We pulled forward to another attendant and asked him where we could have a picnic and he basically told us "in your car, foolio, go park over there."  So we had an in-car picnic and by the time we were done, the freaking place was closed.  So Rubicon sucks.  We're cool, they suck.  That's how it goes.

At least it was a lovely drive and we both got to see Napa for the first time.