Every spring we take Nonnie’s Diner south to get out of the cold and rain and into somewhere warm and sunny. It’s depressing to see the national weater map and face another dreary day of 50 degrees and rain. But it’s pretty easy to get far enough south quickly to enjoy some sun.
Year one we went to Joshua Tree, but quickly agreed that the desert was not our thing.
Year two we went to Yosemite, and quickly agreed we must go back to see more during the fall season.
Year three we went to SW Utah, and quickly agreed it was unfortunate that we had missed all of Utah for the first 60+ years of our lives.
This year Rob said “Wine Country”, and I said “I’ll make reservations!”. I found an exceptionally sweet State Park in the hills above the Sonoma Valley, and booked a week there. The weather was exactly what we hoped for, bright and sunny. Warm during the day and chilly at night, just like the Pacific NW in the summer.
Picking a campsite for a 21′ trailer and tow vehicle is sometimes tricky. We need at least 25′ of length to fit the trailer in and the truck sideways in front of it. Or if it’s really wide we can park alongside. In just under 100 times I’ve found us places to put Nonnie’s Diner, I’ve managed to pick sites that would work for us. Eventually there is going to come a time when I didn’t get it exactly right, and this park was that time.
We had a very long day driving all the way from southern Oregon to Sonoma on Tuesday, across the mountains and down the coast in pouring driving rain. It was snowing hard on Siskiyou Pass so we had to take the long way out to the coast to avoid winter driving conditions. It was still barely daylight when we pulled in, and became apparent very quickly the site was not going to work for us.
Not only was it tiny, it was so sloped that we couldn’t raise the tongue high enough to get the truck out from underneath and we didn’t have enough room to leave the truck hooked up (plus how would we go wine tasting without a truck?). That’s the site above that we were supposed to fit Nonnie’s Diner into. Our camp host Sherry said she has recently spent time updating the parks reservation website with correct measurements.
The rest of the campsite was mostly empty, but we were staying through the weekend when it was all sold out except the one spot we had reserved. Luckily, the camp host noticed us and came over to say hi and see how she could help. And she was a blessing for sure. Next to her site was another huge and level site that was reserved for a second camp host. But she had just gotten word that the other host was going to no show, so the spot was open. We took it, quite gratefully. It’s right on the creek, and perfect for our truck and trailer. I repaid the kindness by inviting her to join us for some yummy carne asada tacos I made for dinnner one night.
Finally settled into a campsite we made some plans to do some wine tasting and bicycle riding. We are about 12 minutes above the town of Kenwood, and 30 minutes from Sonoma. Sonoma County is home to 475 wineries, so choosing which to visit is a big task. I really don’t want to spend $30-$50 each to do a tasting, and also want to know we are somewhere that sells wine I can afford. The good news is Sonoma County has a day pass that costs $40 for four tastings, and has a limited number of wineries right around Sonoma. So I went through that list, based solely on the name of the winery, and checked online to see if I could afford their wines.
We found four stops within about 20 minutes of each other, so I reserved time at each place. Two of the stops were fantastiic, one was a little Meh, and the last one was a total stinker (we’re so special we don’t have time for your outdoor tasting that you prepaid and reserved, you can stand here and I’ll slop some wine your way, No Thanks). Of course wine tasting isn’t about drinking, it’s about learning from the wine host. Benzinger and Larson Family wineries both knocked it out of the park that day. We bought more than we should have from both of those, and the first case of wine landed in the truck.
We had a couple of days of chores to do around the trailer. It was basically our shakedown trip after being parked all winter, and of course just like the boat, there will be things to fix. Namely it was the faucet in the kitchen sink that was too clogged to do dishes. And sadly there are no stores selling RV parts within an hour of the campsite. Everyone’s answer when we called was “just order from Amazon”. I think maybe the real estate is too expensive and the margins on RV parts are too small to pay for the retail space. We ran around to home repair stores and finally located a new faucet that we thought had the right connection fittings, but found out we were wrong. Rob managed to clean the old one enough to trickle water for dishes. We’ll finish solving this one at home.
One day we got our bicycles out for some rides around the park. Sugarloaf Ridge has 25 miles of hiking trails, and a good amount of those are open to bicycles. There is a ridge ride up to a mountaintop that ends with spectacular views of Sonoma Valley and all the way out across the bay to the city of San Francisco. There is no way we could have done this without our power bikes, but so glad we made it to the top.
Our last day of wine tasting took us to the Russian River AVA. What we have learned on this trip is that Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes have thinner skins, and they grow better in a wetter and cooler climate. In California wine country that means the Russian River. We chose a stop at Kendall Jackson, who bottle one of my favorite chardonnays.
Another thing we learned was that the wineries who mass produce like KJ also bottle other more expensive and delicious wines. And that’s what you get for tastings. No surprise, they were delicious. There’s a case now in Nonnie’s Diner as we head north.
For our last tasting I chose a little boutique winery up in the hills away from all the rest. It was named Char Vale. We hoped to find a more personal experience where we got to talk to someone involved in the winemaking process, and learn as much as we could. And we totally scored. Our host wasn’t the winemaker, but he managed the business of this little 10 acre winery and knew all about the winemaking. We spent a couple if hours chatting him up, being the only customers on a Monday afternoon. And we left with our third case of wine in the back seat of the truck. Small world story, his parents live on Wing Point, the bluff you see coming into Bainbridge on the ferry from Seattle.
We left Sugarloaf on a beautiful and sunny Tuesday morning, driving south out of the valley, then east to I-5. Our trip south was two days in awful rain. The trip north will be sunny and warm, so we planned to take a full four days. Our first stop was at a favorite Harvest Hosts, Raging Bull Winery near Orland, CA.
We stopped in the tasting room and bought a couple of bottles in thanks for our free parking spot. Later during a walk we went by the tasting room again and the owners were pouring wine and about to take another couple on a sunset tour of their 200 acre property. We were invited along and said heck yes! It was a fun evening, and the fourth case of wine ended up in Nonnie’s Diner.
What a difference nine days can make. This is Mt. Shasta on a warm sunny day as we crossed Siskiyou Pass on our way north. Back to Seven Feathers Casino RV park for the night. We had planned to stop at two more Harvest Host wineries in Oregon on the way north, but Rob was losing a battle with a cold, and it caught me also. Tonight we’re at a little RV park in Silverton, Oregon. Tomorrow we’ll chug through the last of the miles home.
Here is a nice illustration about some of the things we learned about winemaking this trip. One glass of wine is approximately 630 grapes. All put to good use I would say!
Pix from this trip are here.