California Adventure: Day 2

For starters, let me just say that I have a new respect for anyone who blogs their vacation or travels daily! Taking a few minutes out of the fun to reflect, write, and post is a bit more challenging than I anticipated. This is partly true because I thought "drive time" would be great writing time, but there are so many cool things to see that I don't want to buried in the laptop and miss them!

We woke up Sunday morning to overcast skies, which was fine by us given the prediction of high temperatures later in the day. Breakfast at the Featherbed Railroad Inn wasn't until 9am ... yikes! So we decided to kill some time by going for a tandem bike ride before breakfast and thoroughly enjoyed it! Along the way, we found patches of wild blackberries, so of course we had to stop and pick some snacks to tide us over until breakfast. Yum!

Breakfast was baked French toast and chicken sausage, which turned out to be remarkably yummy. We checked out with a goal of driving around the east side of the lake to explore  Clearlake, CA. This took a bit longer than we planned because of the large number of yard sales and junk stores along the way! Unfortunately, we couldn't quite sort out how to ship back the chalkboard table top for less than the cost of the item!

Our next unplanned stop was the Ceago Vinegarden (http://www.ceago.com) which is closing in September. Now let us just say, this was far more than just a winery. It was a truly spectacular garden on the lake with stunning landscaping and a beautiful walk out to the dock. After strolling through the field of lavender, you arrive at the lake and all of the peaceful stillness you can find on the lake on a Sunday morning. Truly breathtaking. 

Continuing our way around the lake, we started looking for lunch and stumbled upon the Spot in Clearlake on the lake. It s a burger and hot dog joint with lakeside seating and live music. The band was fantastic! Dad, see if you can guess why? They played "raindrops keep falling on my head" as it started to sprinkle :) and followed up with some Everly Brothers and Elvis. In short, a really great band who played the songs we grew up to dancing in the Den Room as well as old country songs that might possibly have made me tear up from time to time. Ask Pierce, he notices this stuff more than I do. 

The next stop was the Six Sigma winery. With both of us having Industrial Engineering in our background, we couldn't resist! However, in spite of beautiful scenery, the wine was overpriced and nothing to write home about. So off we went to Chasewater Winery ... the best winery to date. They were fun, informative, and had very nice wine and olive oil! Well done! And they even referred us to one final winery before we wrapped up in Lake County and headed to find dinner and Eureka. 

Rosa d'Oro also had good wine and we got to meet the owner, who actually grew the grapes and made the wine. He was a character and we thoroughly enjoyed a few minutes with him. Wine tasting, for me, is as much about tasting the wine as it is about meeting interesting people and finding out what motivated them to start in this business and what their vision is for the future!

It was finally time to find dinner before heading out to Eureka for the night. Several people recommended Park Place, an Italian Restaurant, in Lakeport in Lake County, so off we headed. The bonus was the view of the lake and the sailboat having a grand time on the lake! 

After our busy day, we still had the 3-hour drive to Eureka before we could close out the second day of our trip. So off we went, stopping occasionally along the way to enjoy spectacular views of the river running through the canyon. As we prepared to zoom through Leggett, Pierce spotted a sign for a redwood we could drive through! The gentleman was closing the gate as we approached, but let us through right before he locked up. So we were able to drive through an actual redwood! My first redwood sighting!!!

Yes, the rental car made it through! Apparently, even a Suburban can make it through, but I have no idea how! Yes, we eventually made it to the the Red Lion in Eureka ... at 10:30pm local time. We sure do know how to pack a day!