Spring Break I

This past year for spring break, my roomies and I wanted to do a girls' trip!  After a little bit of consideration, heading to Destin, FL with everyone else didn't sound too appealing, a cruise was too complicated, making California sound like the perfect option.  It was a trip filled with lots of laughs, pictures, and fun times.  I think I am going to break our trip into three parts based off of the three places we went: Napa, San Francisco, and Monterey/Carmel.

Saturday, we headed off to Cali as excited as ever!  Baylor was playing in the Sweet 16 tournament, so we came across lots of Baylor fans in the airport.  This meant one thing, we had to start a Sic 'em cheer - yep, we got the whole terminal saying "Ayyyyyyy, sic 'em bears!" These fans even took a picture with us.

My dad met us at the airport and quickly reprimanded us on not following his suggested packing guide of one carry-on per girl.... we all knew that was not going to happen!  Then to further emphasize his point, he proceeded to pack us in the car and literally cover us, Emily and Chloe especially, in suitcases and bags.  Needless to say, we all got an ab workout from laughing so hard!

We started off our trip with a little visit to Napa for some sightseeing and wine tasting.  My mom emailed all of her friends to get suggestions on where we should go, and we finally decided on Castello di Amorosa and Clos Pegase.

My dad made sure to get in a picture with us in his robe, of course, before we left.

We had a little journal to write about our trip.  It had fun things to do like add a few drops of a wine that you had or add a ticket stub!  We weren't as diligent with filling it out as the trip progressed, but it was still fun!
 

The first winery, Castello di Amorosa, was beautiful.  It is housed in a reconstructed castle straight from Italy.  We walked around the grounds for a little while before trying some of their wine.  The wine was great and the atmosphere even better!

Peyton - Bekah - Me - Chloe - Emily

 

 Since Chloe was just a few weeks away from her 21st birthday, she still had to get a kid's ticket.  She was a good sport, even if she couldn't taste the wine.  As a plus, she saved some money!
 

Gotta have some fun shots!

 

 It really felt like we were in Europe.  I would love to come back during the harvest season when you can stomp the grapes, just like they did in that I Love Lucy episode.
 

 Down to the tasting room.
 

 We were surprised by all the animals running around: sheep, goats, peacocks, roosters, and more!

We had lunch at an adorable little bed and breakfast in St. Helena, and we were lucky enough to have live music too!  Next up was the Clos Pegase winery.  We had an awesome tour all to ourselves and learned lots about how wine was made and went through their wine caves.  Napa is an ideal climate to grow grapes to make wine and the weather stays temperate enough that these wine caves in the sides of hills or underground are able to maintain an ideal temperature for storing wine.  Our guide also explained that red wine does better with a cork, so it can be exposed to some error, while white wine does better with a twist off top, so absolutely no air can enter the bottle.

 We had to take advantage of the thumb sculpture to take a "thumbs up" picture.  Looks like Chloe missed the one thumb memo and double timed it.
 

As interested as we were, every tour can have its dull moments.  We just happened to have ours captured on camera.

We finished off the day by finding the house/winery where the Parent Trap movie was filmed, since we still all love it.  That was probably the highlight of the day for all of us.  You can only visit the winery there (Staglin Family) on a private tour, so maybe next time we will get an even better peak at it!