Is an awesome one. Before we left for Napa we had spent the morning hearing climbing stories from the 60s/70s from the lovely Ron (owner of the Blue Butterfly). Having managed to deal with the vertigo just from hearing about El Capitan we were completely bowled over by the old photos he had. Ron was in the midst of the Yosemite climbing world in the 70s (and actually still is - being part of the search & rescue team and still climbing to this day). It also appears that in the 60s/70s climbers looked like members of the Doors and had the ambivalence to match - cue pictures of flare/paisley clad 20 year olds swigging from beer bottles whilst free-climbing El Capitan.
Buoyed by all this we headed off to Nappa in 80 degrees sunshine listening to the Rolling Stones and thinking life was good. Little did we know how good it was going to get. Put simply, Napa is incredible. It is one of the best places on Earth. Not only is the town beautiful (it looks like a film set) I didn't realise quite how literally the 'food focus' was taken. Out of 100 odd retail spaces about 2 aren't restaurants. More importantly one of those restaurants is a Michelin star vegetarian restaurant, described by a non-veggie food critic from the NY Times as one of his top two restaurants of all times and we are going there. Twice. I literally cannot contain my excitement (or my ever expanding waistline).
There is also this incredible indoor food market - full of beautiful artisan caterers, coffee houses, chocalatiers, ice-cream makers you name it they have it. They also have vegan, gluten-free tacos (courtesy of Pica Pica) - they were really quite nice as were the accompanying yuka fries. Now with all this wonder to behold we did of course forget to take the camera out with us so I will post pictures later.
Until the next post, if my fingers are not too fat to type by then.. AD xxx
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