Back from vacation... and the sniper

This last weekend my fiancé, Christie, and I decided to drive to Napa to look at wineries and see if there are any places worthy of having a wedding at. We turned it into a long weekend and left Thursday night so we could spend some time in San Francisco. Pics available here. Story continued in the extended section...

The wackjob whose been picking people off (so far 9 dead and 2 critically injured) in DC lately sure is stirring up the news. I'm interested to see how the whole thing will end. In some ways I feel like the rest of America and I want to see him taken out whatever way possible, because I know if he's captured alive he'll probably get some crazy prison sentence then will be back on the streets in no time. However, something inside me feels disturbed enough to want to see him captured alive and studied in detail to find out what caused him to flip out and start this crazy mission of death. The worst part is you know that he'll get at least one more (and quite possibly more) innocent civilian before he's caught.

The part that scares me is how intelligent the sniper is being. When cops said publicly that children were safe earlier in the case the next day the sniper picked off a kid at school. Every move they predict is wrong so far. The only thing I can predict is that there will be some strange twist before the end, maybe I've just seen too many movies, or worse, maybe the sniper has seen too many movies.

The whole SF/Napa/Sonoma story...

This weekend my fiancé, Christie, and I decided to drive to Napa to look at wineries and see if there are any places worthy of having a wedding at. We turned it into a long weekend and left Thursday night so we could spend some time in San Francisco. We made it to SF about 1am and ended up camping at Mt Talampais (Mt Tam to the locals) in the back of the Xterra.

Friday we woke up and started planning out what we wanted to do. We ended up driving around for a while and seeing the sites, SF is still a favorite of mine because of the huge amount of diversity in the city and some of sociological technical advances you can find. We spent about an hour in the Sony Metreon, which is a hi-tech mall near the Moscone Center. I picked up a couple pieces of hardware for my PS2 and we moved on to Fisherman's Warf to have lunch at Joe's Crab Shack, a Landry's owned restaurant, so we wanted to take advantage of the discounts we'd get from Christie's employment at the Chart House, another Landry's restaurant. Joe's was awesome, we ate crab n' shrimp till we could eat no more. While we ate we were treated by the Blue Angles, who were doing some practice routines over the bay in preparation for Fleet Weekend, where they perform some impressive airiel acrobatics for the crowds that gather around Pier 39. Later Friday evening we drove up towards Napa and found and affordable motel in Fairfield, about 20 miles East of Napa. Thanks to the Route 66 mapping software for that one.

Saturday morning we woke up and drove to Napa to mess around at some wineries and see if we could find any places worthy of hosting our wedding next year. We didn't really find anything for that but we had some great wines and enjoyed a very relaxing picnic. We made it to Clos du Val, Chimney Rock, Pine Ridge, and Rutherford Hills wineries. All were very nice and each winery had a specific wine that was very memorable. We jotted over to Starbucks to wake ourselves up after the massive amounts of wine we tasted and the Chicken Salad sandwiches we brought for our picnic. We then headed North to Buthe-Napa State Park to set up our campsite.

We had a nice campfire at Bothe-Napa State Park and slept well. Sunday we woke up refreshed and ready to hit more wineries. First stop was the C.I.A., but not the one you're thinking of, the Culinary Institute of America. It was amazing, the part we checked out was like a museum of old culinary tools. After the CIA we headed off to check out one of our favorite wineries, V.Sattui, the gardens were beautiful and wine was great, as always. Then we checked out Cline Cellars and Gloria Ferrer's Champagne Vineyards and had a nice lunch. On our way back to Mammoth we stopped a nice little pumpkin patch and picked out a couple nice potentially spooky looking orbs. Then we started the trek back and made back to Mammoth six hours later.

Posted by slugworth at October 15, 2002 02:47 PM