A Southern Journey

I knew I missed The South when we moved back a year or so ago, but I just didn’t know how much. Most days, I miss The West and I don’t even realize how lucky I am to be able to live back here. But there are weekend trips now and again that we take that remind me of precisely this blessing.

If this month would have a nickname, it would be “Food”. Seriously, all we did was spend exorbitant amounts of money on foods pretty much every other day. I am always of the belief that food is not only good or worth exploring only because you pay hundreds of dollars for a bit of it – on the contrary. The most delicious food, I think, is the most primitive, the simplest, cooked in small corners of the world, in the most unexpected, least equipped kitchens. We didn’t seek the extra expensive food. It kind of found us, through chance and some little planning. It is a big month of celebration for personal reasons for us, so I guess it kind of went with the times.

Food is a great excuse to travel. And although food takes us places, we never stop just at that. We try to take the entire place in and experience the most that it has to offer.

A Short Trip to Kinston, NC

First, we spent a day and a night in Kinston, NC. I wrote before that I love taking trips to places that people would ask “Why in the world would you go there?!” about. Kinston might be such a place. I am sure many people have never heard of it, even if they lived in North Carolina for a while. It is in the Eastern part of the state, where rivers run wide and the barbecue sauce has no tomato in it, like God intended!

Some of our friends put together a pilgrimage trip to the Chef and the Farmer restaurant which is featured on a PBS show of some fame, A Chef’s Life. The owner of the restaurant, Vivian Howard, is also the star of that show, giving people a peek into Southern cooking, Eastern Carolina style.

We first stopped at our hotel, a former bank nowadays called The O’Neil, across the street from the restaurant. The hotel is a turn of the (20^th) century former bank. The lobby has antique details, an amazingly ornate plaster ceiling, an enormous vault turned into a bar and luxurious seating behind former teller windows. The hotel only has seven rooms, and each room has a unique personality. We had another couple of friends staying at the hotel who were in a Chinese-motived room, while ours had an English hunting cottage feel.

The Farmers & Merchants Bank in Kinston, NC, now The O'Neil (hotel)

This is how you know this is a small town: we asked the front desk lady if it’s OK to park on the street, on the side of the hotel because we could see no signs for parking. She said, in the most endearing Southern drawl: “Oh, mah goodnesshyeah! You surely can park just about anywear … You see some signs in the street clearly sayin’ ‘No Parking’, but don’t pay them no mind!” She peeked through the window behind her desk and pointed at the cars parked across the street: “You see them cars over there? It saiz ‘No parking’ right there, but they’re parked right under the sign. No one will tow you. Kinston police don’t care. They have bigger fish to fry, I reckon!” – she ended with a shrug. We were wondering about them big fish and what they were. Hmm …

The lobby at The O'Neil - with the ornate plaster ceiling and the giant vault

The place was brimming with hospitality. The front desk lady was nice and helpful, and if you can tell from my retelling the parking story, very welcoming. The vault, like I mentioned, is turned into a giant beer and wine cooler, with a self-serve bar where they invite you to partake of snacks, cookies, fruit, water, beer, wine, or coffee at any hour of the day and night. The cleaning ladies wished us a good weekend when we left, and asked us how our stay had been as if we were old friends. The hotel, like the whole town, really, was quiet. We did feel like maybe we and our friends might have been the only guests that day.

To wait for the rest of our friends to get to town for our planned dinner, we went to Mother Earth Brewing – a brewery, as you might have guessed which was about a block and a half away from our hotel. You really cannot get lost in this downtown. Everything you need to see or do is right there, in a 200 yard square, just about. Some of our friends who had checked into the hotel earlier than us noticed that the lead singer in the band at the brewery was also the front desk person who welcomed them at The O’Neil earlier. It’s all in the family, you see.

After our refreshments at the brewery, we headed towards our destination – Chef and the Farmer.  We were seated in a private room, because of the size of our group – about 16. Between all of us we ordered just about every appetizer on the menu. Because of my weird diet, they had to mash two of their entrees into one – I got the grilled red snapper on top of the sweet potato skins and everything was delicious. The portion sizes were decent, unlike some of the really “fancy” restaurants that skimp on the quantity on the account of presentation and flavor. In this place, each dish had everything: presentation, flavor, uniqueness, and size to please you. The cocktails and the desserts were unique and delicious as well.

The red snapper and sweet potato skins with mushrooms at Chef and The Farmer

The following morning, we headed for brunch at Boiler Room Oyster Bar, a restaurant owned by the same people as Chef and the Farmer. Again – all in the family here. I guess this is not as famous as the fancy restaurant we had dinner in, nor nearly as expensive, but like I said before: it’s not all on the price tag. In fact, the lunch I had at The Boiler Room was in some ways more surprising and more delicious than Chef and the Farmer, especially in its simplicity. I believe half of our group had the butter bean burger, me included. Just as plain as simple as it sounds: a patty made of butter beans and I am not sure what else. But I am sure it had a mix of love, and mystery, a Southern blessing, and a splash of good luck to make it extra special. It was deep fried instead of grilled, and my goodness, was that the best veggie burger my mouth has ever tasted?! It was tasty and as soft as butter melting in your mouth. They did ensure me there won’t be any butter nor mayo, nor eggs, either, in it – and still, it was amazingly delicious: the right measure of savory, salty, crunchy, buttery, melty... You would think people went there for the oysters, but think again – like I said: about 8 people out of our 16 got that burger, vegetarians, vegans, and meat eaters alike and we all loved it.

I hope I’ll travel many a places in my life, but that butter bean burger, I tell you what – won’t leave my memory any time soon.

We strolled the city after our brunch and visited The CSS Neusse – a real-life replica of a Civil War boat -, the local coffee shop, and just walked the streets of downtown Kinston. It’s a sleepy town, with stores open but quiet, and not much foot traffic. One of our friends said “there is nothing in this town but drunk foodies.” We chuckled because we surely recognized all of us in that description.

The CSS Neusse
Click the picture to browse through the Kinston, NC album from this trip

 

Continuing the Journey Through Charleston, SC

Following our weekend in Kinston, NC, we had a weekend planned for Charleston, SC. Now, I won't repeat every truism that was ever said about Charleston. I am sure those of you who visited it know all about why it’s amazing, and those of you who have not have read about it too: the gem of The South, the beauty, the Civil War-era historic hub, the home of Rhett Butler, the “civilization gone with the wind” are just some of those things mentioned about it.  

I usually go to Charleston to slow down and sip the past just like you would a hot cup of mint tea. The aroma of the place seeps into your pores and takes over the body and the mind like a mist. There are many the things you can do in Charleston. So many, there is never a good plan for it, because there is no human way to pack everything there is to do in one weekend!

We settled for strolling Meeting and Market Streets downtown, and looking at the street artists in the City Market while hunting for pralines and a place to eat really good seafood. This was the first night.

The next day, because we had a whole day, we drove to Magnolia plantation, a place that has belonged to the same family since 1600’s (started with The Drayton Family). The plantation home has been rebuilt several times since the first foundation was laid down, and today it’s more like three or four houses and multiple additions put together rather than one cohesive building, although it surely does look like one. The grounds of the former plantation were the star of this show, however. After losing all the money they had in the Civil War, like most landowners in The South, the owner of the plantation decided to open the grounds as a garden, and they remain opened this way today.

The home at the Magnolia Plantation

What's a Southern home without a peacock on the front lawn?! 

The gardens are a scrapbook of forests, pastures, marshes, lakes, all along the Ashley River. They are only very subtly human-touched; they are mostly left to the devices of the subtropical Southern vegetation to shape it in the most wild fashion. The trails are graveled, but crooked and winding through overgrown areas. Azaleas, camelias and Spanish moss brush your face as you squeeze yourself through the many narrow pathways and trails. While admiring the beauty of the trees, bushes, and flowers (all in bloom, it seemed just for us, as this was April, one of the most flora-rich times of the year in The South), we were watchfully crossing bridges over ponds and estuaries of the Ashley river on the lookout for alligators. I was watching the trees for snakes, too, but I figured with that many vines, it would be impossible to tell which one was a snake and which was a vine. The alligators did not let themselves waited for for too long. They were shamelessly swimming around, undisturbed, it seemed, by the sizable crowds of visitors.

I love visiting old Southern homes, because you see America’s history rolling right in front of your very eyes in the stories they amount inside those walls, in the pictures, décor, books. All its glories, and shadows, all the ghosts, and belles of the past, all carefully and elegantly tucked inside the grand staircased foyers and plantation shutters …

Alligator at the Magnolia Plantation

For dinner, we found a treat of a place called Hanks, close to our hotel not far from The City Market. The food here was a little too overpriced for what it was, but the cocktail I had (it was a locally inspired one), called Colonial Daiquiri (rum based) was divine! I also loved their special salad which had the most enormous shrimp (sized more like lobster than shrimp), arugula, and roasted potatoes (I kid you not!) in a roasted tomatillo vinaigrette. Holy salad gods! I still don’t think it was worth the almost $20 it cost, but it was memorable. Maybe not quite as amazing as that butter bean burger in Kinston – but still something to definitely remember.

Walking the streets of Charleston is really my favorite thing to do down there: shooting the beautiful doorways, people watching around the Waterfront Park and the Pineapple Fountain, hearing the giggles of college girls taking selfies at The Rainbow Row, watching people line up for food at Blossom, Magnolia’s, or Hyman’s – all color the Charleston experience in its own unique way. This is a town encapsulating so much history within its brick walls and cobblestone streets like a snow globe: you shake it and another memory forms – all real, all old, and yet right in front of your eyes.

Charleston entry way

There is a smell about Charleston that stays with you: it’s a mix of sea and mold, a mixture of uncured antiques and jasmine or some other bloom.

The Pineapple Fountain at Waterfront Park

We picked funky-named places, with hippie or Southern names to have breakfast in both days we were there. We figured how could we go wrong with such choice deliberation?! On the first morning we were there, we went to Another Broken Egg (their crab cakes are so fresh you’d think they reached out into the waterfront for the crabs right then and there), and Page’s Okra Grill in Mount Pleasant, the second day. That place is a zoo. Not sure how the wait staff doesn’t turn postal on people – there is not one revolving door of many people queued up to get in but two of them – one through the front of the store and one through the back patio. With all this apparent commotion, the staff never misses a beat: good ol’ Southern hospitality is at home here. Their breakfast potatoes are to kill for!

Rainbow Row

The last day, we drove across the many bridges around Charleston in look for an islandscape we could shoot. We ended up on Sullivan’s Island for a short hike and a peek at the ocean. Again, we were mindful of alligators and snakes, but luckily found neither one that day. Crossing over the dunes onto the beach was like seeing one of those multi-commercialized prints all the hotels down the beach hang in their bedrooms: water brush swinging in the wind, sand blowing at an angle, with seagulls diving in the horizon, where it meets the water … Idyllic and peaceful comes to mind, if you think the beach is peaceful.

The beach at Sullivan's Island

While we chased all these treasures, and all the history and the tastes of The South, during both trips we got lost on ancient (for America) streets lined with magnolias, live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. There was not even a hint of a breeze in the branches. The trees and the houses with old fences and gates were silent, sleepy, immersed in a slumber of centuries. The thing I missed the most about The South is just The South … The old homes, with wrap-around porches and the big columns in front, the pineapple details on the front staircases, the narrow streets with even narrower, uneven sidewalks. The awkward, cluttered layout of an old city that ran out of room for new homes. The smell of mold and dampness, the humidity in the air that makes my hair feel like it was dipped in molasses. I missed all that, down to the sweaty skin I get when walking around the honey-like air … The buttery taste of food from people who know how to use butter and a fryer. I must have been born in The South at some point in the past. If not that, then I am not sure what ghost lives inside my chest, because for sure it does, as it always understands this song …

Whether food called us out to the road, or  whether we just found it looking for some other treasures is irrelevant. Dipping ourselves into the past and into our surrounds for a spell is always a treasure, no matter the pretense. This weekend, I found out that The South is still here and has waited for me, patiently, unchanged, for the nine years I have been gone. There is something to be said for timelessness and eternity – and The South surely knows a thing or three about those …  

  

Timeless Charleston, SC
Click the picture to browse the entire album from this trip

Returning to Old Places and Discovering Something New. Always.

I am writing this as I am sitting in my hotel bed somewhere in The Rockies after climbing up the elevator while listening to the hotel radio playing “Linger” by The Cranberries. I remember where I was the first time I listened to this song and fell in love with the Irish band: I was in Romania and the year was probably around 1990 something ... How long I have come! How far I have traveled! ... This life truly is a trip!

This is my umpteenth hotel in the past two months which have had me traveling from the Atlantic to The Rockies, to the Atlantic and back to The Rockies again ... How I could manage to do so much travel while dodging two hurricanes still boggles my mind, but that is a topic for another blog...

For this one, I just wanted to stop and remember the fun times we have had, the new places I found and the old ones I have rediscovered during these past few months.

We started this marathon with a return trip to Asheville. We had not been there together for 11 years. Just saying that sounds wrong, but it is true. 

Asheville seems both stuck in a timeless warp and anew and fresh with new blood at the same time. The streets are filled with hippies, Krishnas, dirt, music, joy, laden with history and memories; a bon vivant-ness flows in the olden streets at dusk on a Saturday; the breweries abound and lure the traveler in with summer brews waiting to be savored, the mountains are a stone-throw away, ready to be explored. At the end of August, Asheville was still very hot. The city seemed a lot more crowded and a lot more happening than I remembered it ... That was the new part.


The Biltmore was gorgeous, in its everlasting beauty. The only thing that rivaled its beauty and richness this time around was an exhibit of Chihuly’s works of art - stunning beauty creations of massive amounts of glass and steel. The glassworks paired with the natural beauty of the gardens and the mountains, juxtaposed with the carefully detailed architecture of The Castle gave us a wonderful escape from our daily grind into a world all its own - grandiose, rich, timeless.

Chihuly at Biltmore was one of those things you'll remember as long as you'll live. It was not on my bucket list, but it so should have been. If you ever have the opportunity to see this artist's work, don't hesitate! How something so fragile can withstand so much nature and abuse is amazing to me. A great reminder of every one of us: we're so brittle but we all weather storms.

We had brunch at The Grove Park Inn, and that was hands down the most varied and plentiful brunch I have ever had anywhere. I thought for years that the brunches in Sundance or Snowbird, Utah were well done, but The GPI has them beat.  Till proven otherwise - the best. I usually go for the smoked salmon at these feasts, but I had not one but three choices of smoked fish with this one: salmon, trout, and mackerel, alongside any other seafood you can imagine, from shrimp, to oysters and lobster ... This just to name one kind of the many kinds of dishes they offer.

The majestic stonework at The Grove Park Inn

It’s amazing that we did so much in Asheville just in a one-night weekend. I am so glad we are back in these parts where we could escape to so many places within driving distance from us, on impulse and be able to see and do so much!


In September, we went to our first Triangle Heart Walk, which benefits the American Heart Association and gives the money to the research in our communities. I have participated in it before in other communities, and this has been a cause which I have supported, for obvious reasons (if you know me) for years. All I can say about this event is that it ... was ... hot. Not just hot, but exhaustingly hot ... We were wimps and walked 1 mile instead of the 3 because it was brutal! As a heart patient, it was a great meet: I always like to hear the stories of other people “like” me - we’re really all unique and every heart condition is different. This was my first time meeting a heart transplant patient and being every bit as amazed, in awe, and overwhelmed as I always thought I would be when faced with such an individual. He was an inspiration. There is something special about people who get to die a little and then come back, there is no doubt about this. None.


Also in September I got to jump on a plane and come to Park City, UT for a conference. It has always been melancholy to travel back to the place I called home: my first married, happy home, for seven years. A place where I had always dreamed I would live. It’s a bitter-sweet feeling to go back: I miss these parts but I know, in my heart, that I don’t belong here anymore. Park City was cool and bright gold from the changing aspen; a perfect backdrop for the start of the fall.

Aspen mountains on the lake in Park City, Utah

Back on the East Coast it was time to take my sweet, amazing nephews to the SC beach - one of them for the first time in his little 7 year-long life! Call me crazy, but for a childless person, I have always enjoyed traveling with kids. It is amazing to see how they step out of their comfort zone and explore a world they didn’t know that existed. We started by barely being able to pull them out of the house, and pry them away from their devices with more or less force, and we ended with not being able to round them back up and bring them back in the room when they discovered how much fun jumping over the waves or floating in the lazy river, or sinking in the pool is. For two kids raised in the frozen tundra of Canada the beach was “pure paradise.” They said as much. To see the sparkles in their eyes with every new “different” restaurant experience or shopping adventure is rejuvenating. Reminds us, old, and cynical people, that the world should never cease to wonder us, as long as we stay open and come out to meet it.

First time together jumping the ocean waves - a breathless moment in time. So grateful to have been able to give them this and share this with them.

In Park City, I wore sweaters and scarves. In Myrtle Beach, SC, I wore a bathing suit and thought I was literally melting, decomposing, surely dying from sun exposure ...


Again, Myrtle Beach is one of those trips back in time for me, but I always make a point of finding something new to explore even in my old timey places. This time was the Pier 14 Restaurant which is literally on the Ocean (on stilts, part of a pier) and which did not exist 20 years ago when I lived there. The grouper filet and the mashed potatoes were to die for! I can say I got my seafood fix during this trip, for sure, and as any respectable coast town theirs doesn’t disappoint.

Blaga (look him up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Blaga) says that "eternity was born in a village." I say that we see eternity with our own naked eye in every sunset we watch.

There is something of that when the sun is being born from the immensity of the sky and it's reflecting its birth into the immensity of the ocean ... Time just stands still forever ...

And after all that adventure, I am back in The Rockies for more work and maybe some play, too ... As exhausting as these past two months have been, and as much as I still miss home, I am very fortunate, lucky and blessed beyond belief to be able to do this much. Not just financially, not just through the grace of my employer, but also through the grace of God and the knowledge of all my doctors who keep me going at this speed in my advancing age (aren’t all our ages advancing?!), with my advanced health problems.


I am also grateful that the world we live in is, still, allowing to some extent for us to mov about freely and explore it deeply. This is no small gift especially nowadays! 

I will continue to push on, open more doors, discover more of what this life has to give me. One page at a time.

“ ... if you could return, don't let it burn, don't let it fade...” (The Cranberries, Linger)

Milestones, New Things and Everything in Between - My Recent Life In Pictures

Never too tired for words, but I do this every once in a while - I let the images speak for themselves and account for me. 

Some of the things that took my breath away or made me stop and think for a bit, lately: 

 

Reaching this elevation, with still a (literally) broken heart, and living to tell the tale. Really grateful to my doctors and to God for this milestone, as I am for every day.

 

First camping trip this year. There is nothing more peaceful to me than looking at mountains over an open fire and smelling the pines.  

 

A first ever for me: camping and painting. Loved it and hoping for much more of these cozy days.

 

I hate dandelions in my yard, but I love them "in the wild". The mountains are just now starting to breathe life.

 

The aspen are awake, too, up there on the peaks.  

 

First harvest from the yard.

Another milestone: my first ever US passport expired this month. This means I have been a citizen for 10 years. How time flies! 

 

My favorite food find was on my own grill so far, this year: tuna steaks, marinated for a day and a little bit beforehand. So delicious and way too filling. 

 

Parade of Homes is on, our favorite yearly tradition. A candle poured in a wood block really stayed with me.

 

Second harvest from our yard. So deliciously sweet.   

 

I relate deeply with lotus flowers. I finally made time to paint this, this month. 

 

I usually never say "never", but in this case I mean it: I can never get enough of these mountains.   

 

A sign in one of the Parade of Homes houses. I try to live by it.

A Sip of This, a Bite of That ...

A journey through Northern California

California has haunted me for most of my life. I have always wanted to go see it, but I guess I share that dream with a lot of folks.

Growing up, all I knew about America was California and Dallas. OK, MAYBE The Statue of Liberty, but it was not till probably in first or second grade that I knew that was in New York. Everything, to me, was in California. California and America were perfect synonyms. What?! They are not one and the same country?! Well, as I have discovered in this last trip – they are very much not the same country. Most times, anyway.

We started off on a Saturday, on a road trip towards the Western state. On I-80 West of Salt Lake City things are flat. And salty. The Salt Flats fit their name to a tee. Yes, I did have to jump out of the car and taste the soil, just to make sure all that whiteness is salt. It is. The huge mountains of salt being harvested from basins on the side of the roads testify to that also.

Onward through Nevada we had again that Dorothy-like, deserted feeling we experienced in Kansas this year: lost. Just vast lands, big sky and nothing much more than dust. One would tell you that there are only two colors, yellow and blue, for the sand and the sky, but there are so many shades of those colors your eyes hurt! I guess if Eskimos have 100 words for “white” (or is it “snow”?!), Nevadans should have 100 words for “yellow”. In Nevada, because of wide spaces and infinite horizons, you get to see the beauty in the simplicity of the desert. The vegetation is scarce, but the land is vast and overwhelmingly present.

Once you cross the border in California, you literally feel like you are in a different country. People drive faster, traffic thickens and roads are horribly, horribly worse than anywhere else I have ever been. The landscape is different, too: lots of pine trees and junipers are now adorning the sides of the rocky mountains everywhere. Whereas in Nevada the dimension is horizontal, in Northern California you flip your vision by 90 degrees to vertical: there is only one way the eye can look, and that is up, from the winding, narrow valleys of the highways and you see the blue skies. Everything is close up and personal there!

We planned to make Napa Valley our main base for the short stay, and travel around it, for wine, food, sightseeing and photo opportunities, and of course people watching. I guess I can safely say we accomplished all that. We spent a couple of days winery touring, one day in San Francisco and on our way home, we stopped in South Lake Tahoe (for some WEIRD reason my tongue continues to call it “Lake Taco”) for lunch and lots of photos. It was a beautiful journey, one that I hope I can make another day, a little less rushed, and a little bit longer, so I can see all the beautiful adjacent places to these spots we saw this time.

A few travel notes for next time and for those interested in following in our footsteps.

Food in Napa and around is amazing. Yes, we did spend a bit more for food, because this was a special occasion for us, but even when we didn’t, when we stopped at a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, food tasted delicious. We had lunch at Armadillo's, in St. Helena, a Fresh Mexican food place, and it was like nothing I have ever tasted before! All the ingredients tasted like what they were not like melted cheese under a broiler.

The resorts do a fantastic job of cooking everything gourmet and everything familiar with a gourmet twist. Some of my favorite finds were the cold corn and lime soup at Solbar at the Solage Resort in Calistoga, as well as the herb French fries at Siena, the restaurant at Meritage, in Napa, our home for the trip. Now, two words of caution here: Solbar changes their menu daily, so the soup might be a one day event there, but everything they do is out of this world, so, you're in luck anyway. Siena (our “own” restaurant) has absolutely horrible service for dinners, from what we have experienced. Morning service was OK, but dinners – not so much. Unless you planned to spend at least two and a half hours for dinner and 30 minutes waiting for someone to show up to take your order, I would not recommend Siena. All I could figure was: well, they have you there! You stay there, you come in for dinner because you probably are too tired (or too tipsy) to drive anywhere else, they can make you wait forever – where else would you go?! Definitely below par from what you expect from a highly rated resort.

I WILL have to say one word (OK, maybe several!) about Morimoto Napa Restaurant. For those of you who watch Iron Chef America, you know who Masaharu Morimoto is: he’s this Japanese “iron chef”, one of the original “iron chefs” from the original Japanese show by the same name. You will see him cook on the American version of the show, and as one of our friends put it “he is the one who is always perfect”.

He has a restaurant he owns in Napa . I am not too sure how this whole thing works, whether he comes up with the menu, or ever cooks it, or supervises the chefs through video conference from New York, or even has anything to do with anything in there at all other than putting his name on the place and grabbing a check every month. Not sure how much of Morimoto is involved in the food is what I am saying. But the foods on the menu are pretty close to the tradition he’s cooking in: Japanese, lots of fish, fresh ingredients, original pairings of flavors.

The dinner we had there was definitely an experience of a lifetime! We looked around and no two plates looked alike! Every food had its own kind of plate or bowl, various colors to complement the foods, and various shapes. I had a crème brulee that had blueberries and Earl Grey tea in it, and lemongrass ice cream on top. Now, lemongrass is something you eat in your fried rice dishes, or your glass noodle Thai soup, as a veggie … The whole thing was exploding with flavors and just melting in my mouth. And I hate desserts, mind you! But this was not a dessert. It was a journey.

I had to have some sushi, as Morimoto describes himself as a sushi chef, primarily. I had flying fish roe and then king crab sushi – fresh, sea-like and simple! My fried rice and yellow tail came in this 400F Dutch oven kind of bowl – everything in the bowl was uncooked, except for the rice – the waitress cooked everything in front of me by mixing everything together and allowing every bite to touch the hot walls of the bowl– it was sooo fresh when I tasted it! There were ingredients in there I never had in fried rice before: mushrooms, nori, spinach all “fried” in sesame oil. Again, the rainbow of flavors was amazing: the salty fish with the woodsy mushrooms and the green spinach, the sweet sesame oil and again salty, sort of pickled nori – your mouth didn’t know where to go to describe it all!

My husband had a ginger and peach “martini” that was pretty boozy and surprisingly tasty, for ginger, in my opinion. He also had miso soup and pork chops with kimchi and ginger – in he Japanese tradition of perfect balance, they balance heavier meats (pork) with a smaller, leaner side (kimchi). In an American restaurant, you’d get pork chops AND potatoes AND fried onions on top! His dessert was tofu cheesecake with maple and coffee reduction sauce and maple ice cream. The cheesecake was like chewing on air – so light!

We didn’t have any bad service to speak of at Morimoto’s – the place runs like a scientific experiment – we were waited on by several people and we were showered with attention, although the place was incredibly full! The décor is something else too, but I don’t want to take too much longer here, so, just, please … visit the pictures .

The wine, of course, is plenty in Napa. And that is all I am going to say in the adjective department. Wine, much like any taste derivative, is a personal choice. And my mom always said don’t ever argue about taste! And I won’t. Some wine was good and some was not so good. To us. Some of the wineries we visited were: Domaine Carneros (my first “sparkling wine” winery), Artesa, Folie a Deux and Napa Cellars, Sutter Home, Freemark Abbey, V. Sattui, Joseph Phelps.

I have read a lot before I headed out there, but unfortunately not before we booked the trip: they tell you that Sonoma is a white and sweet wine place (more South, longer summers), and Napa is a red wine place, and a dry wine region – for the most part. Of course, there are various things to be found in both. But yes, they are right: Napa is predominantly “red”. We are mostly sweet white wine drinkers. OK, we’ll give a Riesling and a Pinot Grigio a try once in a while, but we like our “Kool-Aid” on the lines of Muscats and Ottonels . Sutter Homes and V. Sattui had the sweetest Muscat wines, the most perfumy ever! And thus we tasted the difference between Moscato, which is what you can typically find in any grocery store in America (well, except Utah, of course), and Muscat, which is what I grew up with, back home: fuller body, in the sugary content. All grapes, sun and deliciousness!

At Joseph Phelps we had a beautiful surprise because their grounds were by far the most serene and spectacular: just simple, quiet beauty. We were there on Harvest Day, September 7, and they were all looking forward to a wonderful new season, as these folks really get into their trade. The winery is by far the most upscale, and most "technical" of all of the ones we saw - not for the pleasure drinker, for sure: they talk about their wines in “points” and percentage of wines that make a blend. And they offer private tastings with a wine specialist in this beautiful, all wood tasting room. Definitely “up a notch”.

They are off the beaten path of the Hwy 29, but so worth the short trip. Whereas all the wines were anywhere between $5 and $25 at all the other wineries, Phelps’s bottles started at $45 and stopped at $225. They make mainly Bordeaux style wines, Merlots, and Cabs, very “full body” some say … but to us, they are “full of chalk”. And yes, I said that to them, and of course they stopped paying attention to me.

I personally don’t believe in the absolute in wine! There is no such thing as an absolutely great wine. I think it is such a subjective matter of palate and taste that you cannot tell me a full body Cab is the best wine ever produced and a fully aromatic Muscat or a perfectly balanced and smooth Pinot Gris is junk! Because what makes a wine great, after all, if not the taster?! I believe strongly that wine, just like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Phelps also reminded me that price has nothing to do with what you like, either. If it brings you pleasure and you only spend $.50 on it, more power to you, I say! A $225 bottle tasted worse, to me, than any $5 bottle of Muscat I ever bought.
Beautiful place, though. Definitely worth the trip, for the grounds, the trellis work and the largest wisteria in the world hanging off of it. Just don’t mention their wine is chalky if you want to make friends!

I think the funniest memory I’ll have from the wine journey will be the fact that when sales people were asking us where we’re from at the wineries, and we said Utah, they would make this very sad face and add “Oh, I am SO sorry!” – because they knew about our silly alcohol rules up here. But I will have to say, we got out of being upsold on memberships and “wine clubs” by telling them “hey, we’re from Utah, you can’t ship alcohol there”. And they can’t. And they were bummed. And we weren’t. Although the Muscat from Sutter Home would make my day every time it would arrive in the mail! For sure.

And speaking of Sutter Home – they also have beautiful grounds, although on Hwy 29, smack dab in the middle of traffic! They have the most gorgeous gardens. And that’s the thing about California: the vegetation is amazing! You get thousands and thousands of acres of vineyards, of course, but then you get olive orchards, and orange trees and lime trees and bushes, and lemon trees, and pomegranates, and palm trees and cactuses, and … pine trees …and what NOT?! It’s beautiful, and diverse, and lush green and fresh! The roads leave a lot to be desired, for sure, but what a delight for the eyes the hills are!

Till you get to San Francisco that is! Well, maybe I am once again biased here! You see, I am not a big city girl! I am one of those people who’ll tell you that NYC is “great to visit but not to live in”. Same thing in San Francisco! Man, what a zoo! And yes, surely: part of the zoo was the fact that we drove into it on Labor Day (Monday) and the place was abuzz with tourists, but part of it is just San Francisco: traffic, and more traffic, and pushy merchants, and crazy hills to drive on, and no parking and … metropolitan jungle at its worst! And I said nothing about the tourists everywhere – because the only other place I ever saw that many tourists, their bikes, go carts, kids, strollers, dogs and funky fashion styles was in New Orleans. Very colorful!

We had lunch at Lolli’s Castagnola’s in the Fisherman’s Wharf, and we had the world’s weirdest waitress serving us. We were perfectly sober, but we could not tell whether she (“Jennifer”) was a man or a woman, nor whether she was sober, drunk or high … She was something else … She started by saying she will make us “the world’s best Long Island Ice Tea”, as she is a world renowned, award winning bartender first, and a waitress next. And everything after that was “the best”, “the mostest” that we ever had, according to her … She had to “flirt with the chef for extra shrimps on my sandwich” and that alone almost killed my appetite. The seafood we had was definitely fresh, but not spectacularly cooked. The Long Island Ice Tea, however, was apparently amazing, according to my husband who did take her up on the offer.

We took a boat tour of the San Francisco Bay, and floated by The Golden Gate and Alcatraz Island, and just peeked, away in the distance, at the San Francisco – Oakland Bridge. I always love bay cruises, because they put things into perspective for you. I do enjoy riding through a city (or walking it, like we did a bit, too) to get a feel of what that city is, but I love seeing it from afar, too. After all, when you see postcards from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, etc – it’s always some skyline shot from some body of water, isn’t it?! So, seeing it in real life for yourself kind of gives you the feeling of “Wow! I have made it there!”.

The bay tour was great, I thought. Gave us perspective and a nice, relaxing way to look AT the city. And they don’t call it “the Fog City” for nothing! It IS foggy! All our pictures can tell you that! We didn’t visit Alcatraz, but I was shocked by the amount of decay we could see from the boat. I visited Ellis Island, and I was moved at how everything looked like it must have been many years ago, when it was a working island. I don’t know the history of Alcatraz that well, so I am not sure why it could not be preserved, but … it felt very depressing, and not just because of the fact that it’s a prison island. It felt like staring into a skeleton.

On our last day, we drove back home through Lake Tahoe. And what a beautiful trip back home that was! The Tahoe area is gorgeous. I am not sure how else to put it – but it’s just one of those places you just NEED to go to before you die! It’s beautiful mountain landscape at its best – breathtaking, raw and wild. Between the simple and tall beauty of the pine trees and redwoods, and the bareness of the rocks and the clear of the lake, you don’t know where to look for simple amazement!

The California part is nice and landscape - coordinated, all log cabins and stonework. No building almost violates the beauty of the land. You cross over into Lake Tahoe-Nevada, though, and as my husband said “you get lots of cheese in a hurry” – casino signs and billboards out of this world!

Nevertheless, the beauty of the mountains and the lake endures, and no human cheese can really temper that!

We had lunch at an Irish Pub and just drove along the shore of the lake for pictures. We stopped in the canyons for more photo opps, of course! It was like an extra breath of fresh air (in more ways, literal and not) before our long and relatively boring drive through Nevada, back home. But as any traveler will tell you: any corner of the world reserves a surprise, and we were lucky enough to once again be speechless when we almost found the “pot of gold” in the desert . Must have been that Irish blessing we got at the pub in Tahoe.

We loved our trip, and if we were to do it again, we would do it in a heart beat! We would like to go back to Tahoe right away, just for a longer weekend, or so … California was naturally gorgeous, but humanly weird, I guess. People are not friendly. They are always in a rush, and always want to sell something. Whatever it is about Napa, they’re trying to sell you on two things: wine and spas! And they’re really pushy! The roads are horrible and in a state with toll roads and 9% taxes I am not sure why they can’t fix them … The overpopulation feeling definitely kicks in in California. I come from North Carolina which does seem more crowded than Utah, but California is like Time Square at the size of a state. OK! I have not seen the whole state of California, but everything between Sacramento, San Francisco, and Tahoe is way too tight, population wise.

Another characteristic of the area is that there is a lot of “green initiatives” – more than I have seen in any other states: lots of solar panels on the houses, traffic lights, wineries, lots of windmill power, lots of “green” in restaurants (no ice, tap water, real, cotton towels to be reused, etc).

Like anywhere in the Southwest, there is a huge Hispanic influence here – and that was actually one of my favorite features! All our Hispanic waiters and waitresses were by far the best, friendliest and worked hardest. Just a side note, but an important one to me, when I will look back!

The small Western towns are a gem, if you can navigate the traffic to get into them. Old buildings, and lots of live oaks and palm trees. Nice houses, sort of Mediterranean in architecture, with overgrown gardens that offered much needed shade and privacy. These settlings are an oasis of small town feel in the middle of madness. St. Helena and Yountville were very quaint and quiet.

And what is California without star sightings, right?! So, apart from being in an internationally renowned chef’s restaurant, we also were seated at the table next to Tyler Florence , another chef, and his entourage, when we dined at Solbar. I will not go into the details of our eavesdropping, but suffice it to say, the conversations involved cooking with “aromatic herbs”, the kind some people in Amsterdam smoke. Or so I thought I heard.

It was definitely a fast forward trip, with the long drive and the not many (five) days we spent there. But it was an experience in more ways than one: cultural, culinary, oenological, geographical and definitely psychological!

I cannot find a better ending to this than the statement my husband summarized California in: “The experts have determined that Pluto is no longer a planet. California is in no danger of such a re-classification - it is a planet unto itself.”

Just GO! It’s worth it! And remember to take a camera, too. This way, you’ll end up with 2000+ pictures, like we did. Enjoy some of them here .

A “Silly” Weekend

"The best things in life are silly." (Scott Adams)

Well, it was not really a whole weekend of silliness but Sunday was pretty chuckly!

I have seen this street festival in Park City advertised everywhere ever since I came to UT – it’s called “Park Silly Sunday Market”. And I kept wondering: “Now, how silly can Utah be?! Really!”. True, Park City is not the “mainstream” Utah, it is more hip, with lots of arts and open minded people, lots of hippies and even breweries within less than miles from each other, a tourist town, too, with ski slopes descending right down to Main Street where people from all over the world flock in the winter to get a feel for “the greatest snow on earth”. So, I guess it has some potential for something other than kids and straight up Mormons which we’re seeing around our neighborhood!

But still, this was a Sunday, when everything else is dead in Utah, so, how riotous can it get?! Well, there was only one way to find out. We headed up there and what follows is a sneak peek into what the streets showed us.

Save from some brief comments, I’ll let the pictures tell the story. Hope you find our little journey as silly as it wanted to be.

Out of all the many “silly” puppies at the event, this was my favorite! However cliché this might sound, he was a poster child for Beethoven! Just everything you ever think of a Saint Bernard and then some. All 250 pounds of it!

Book in the window of a store, or … Utah in a nutshell?! Made me smile to picture “lonely” surrounded by 1000 screaming kids!

As explosively delish as this sounds, I like the disclaimer above it better: “All ingredients are organic, in season, local, whenever possible”. I am SO GLAD there are people our there who do not take all this “organic – local – all natural – I am better than you for eating tasteless dirt” mumbo-jumbo so seriously sometimes!

I thought I saw it all a few years back when I had garlic ice cream! But this is a close contender to that. One question though: WHY in the world would you ruin precious, delicious pig with chocolate, pray tell?! Oh, that’s right: ‘just to be silly’, perhaps! *Eye roll and sigh*

Now, I have never tasted “passion” nor “integrity”, but they smelled pretty good!

Well, at least you can’t sue them for false advertising!! – on a T-shirt in a gift store.
*Chuckle-chuckle*

We did have some street food at the festival, as it was mandatory, of course – bbq pork, smoked sausage and corn on the cob lathered in butter. But the true gastronomic win of the day was indoors: Wasatch Brewery (or is it Squatters??? – don’t get me started, it’s confusing!) had this coconut beer (ale) battered shrimp on green papaya (and carrots) salad with red chili aioli. Oh, my God, was it a trip between tastes in your mouth: savory-and-sweet-and-tangy-and-spicy-and-…YEAH!!! The beer find was great, too: they call it “nitro cream ale”, and it has no fizz, it’s almost room temperature and it’s just like drinking a smoothie – VERY creamy!

The above mentioned indoor "feast"

And as everywhere in Utah … there were a lot of short people! All running around getting caught in stranger’s legs, and tripping on even shorter puppies! Whining about the heat, or munching on street fare. Trying to “navigate” the sea of little ones is always my (and not to mention Aa’s) biggest challenge! No, it’s not their fault, it’s the mindless parents, of course! And this is why this sign made my day and was my favorite silly note of the trip. It was like whoever made it heard my pain loud and clear:

“Take them home, now, lady mom and mister pop, sir, and YOU deal with them!”

After walking around in smoldering heat, we sought refuge in the Kimball Art Center which displayed three galleries, of various media (paint, photography, quilting, digital printing, food art etc). I always love checking out local galleries in places I travel, because almost always you find things you would never see anywhere else. The exhibit of various wall hanging quilts was my favorite, but Bridget Conn’s art was truly unusual, and unforgettable, in a skin – crawling, jaw - clenching kind of way, at times.

When I first told people I am moving to Utah, they all told me “Wow! Well, that’s great, but don’t expect much diversity there! It’s all one color in every way”. And weekends like these make me prove them wrong every single time. So much to see, so little time! And despite popular belief: we are lucky to have them so close to us!

Click on the picture to see the whole album of the “Park Silly Sunday Market”.