"Old Faithful" and a Castle

Yesterday we went to San Francisco, primarily to have clam chowder and sourdough bread. It was very cloudy, cold, and windy, but we looked around awhile and Mamaw and I bought some spiral earrings that were patented by the designer I discovered when I was here about 15 years ago. When it started to get really crowded, we headed back over to Oakland to our hotel.

Today we headed back up to the Russian River area and then back down through Sonoma again but stopped in different towns. In Calistoga we discovered a geyser that is one of only 3 in the world designated as "Old Faithful" because it erupts on a regular time schedule. We arrived there about 2 minutes before it erupted so felt very fortunate. It went about 60 ft. in the air and lasted for almost 5 minutes...very impressive. Here's a couple of pictures:

There were also goats here, so I took a few pictures of them just for Cindy.

As we were leaving Calistoga we saw what looked like a castle up on the hillside, so Ed turned around to check it out. It was a winery in a really cool-looking old castle. We did the wine tasting, and it was some of the best wine we had ever tasted--totally smooth with absolutely no bitter or sharp tastes at all. Being a small winery, they only sell from the winery or on-line, no retail outlets. Here are a few "castle" pictures, some of which I plan to use when I teach Macbeth and Hamlet just to show the kids what the different parts of a castle look like.

The castle even had a moat that we crossed.

After we left Calistoga we went to St. Helena which is the town where the wine train turned around the other night during our dinner trip. It was a really cute little town and the sight of the original Taylor's Automatic Refresher Diner, so we stopped by there for lunch. It was 3:00 and the line was all the way out to the street. The diner was surrounded by picnic areas under trees, so it was a very pleasant place to stop. The following picture is of Mamaw waiting at a table while we stood in line to order. She never had any trouble finding someone to talk to--it only took her about 30 seconds to be in the middle of a conversation with someone!Everywhere was getting really crowded with tourists pouring in for July 4th tomorrow, so we finally headed back to the bay area--took forever! As we got nearer to San Francisco/Oakland, we were glad we were going south because all those folks heading north out of the cities were really backed up--looked like a 3-lane parking lot most of the time. Lots of the cars were stacked up with cooler,bicycles, etc., ready for a weekend of "leisure."