Vacation in Wine Country

As stated in my previous blog, I was recently on vacation. I went to the US for vacation, and visited New York, Washington DC and also San Francisco / Napa Valley / Sonoma County. The trip to Napa Valley / Sonoma County, or wine country, was really quite fun and exciting. I got to taste many excellent wines from California, purchased a lot of wine, some that are not available for purchase outside of the winery, and also ate a lot of good food and just overall really enjoyed my experience. My five days at the wine country was really relaxing, and it made me realized an extreme advantage of living and working in San Francisco / Palo Alto area, that during the weekend, I can just go up to wine country and stay there for 2 days, a very nice getaway.

We arrived in San Francisco Airport on Wednesday, around 10am. After getting our rental car, the first thing that I wanted to do is to go and get some In&Out burger. In&Out burger is this fast food chain in California that serves awesome burger, fries and milkshake. I think this is another benefit of living in California, that you can get In&Out burger, yummy. So we drove all the way to this town of Petaluma, where they have the only In&Out in Sonoma County. Since we woke up really early in order to catch the 7am flight, we didn’t really ate much for breakfast, and by the time we get to In&Out, it was around 12pm PT, which is really 3pm NY time, and as you can imaging, we are extremely hungry. I woofed down my double double burger with grilled onions, and a burger has not tasted this good for such a long time. After the much needed nourishment, we set off to this bakery called Della Fattoria Café & Bakery also in Petaluma (141 Petaluma Boulevard North, Petaluma, CA 94952) to pick up some provisions for the picnic that we are planning tomorrow before we head off to some wineries. We ordered a duck sandwich and also a cheese and pate platter from Della Fattoria Café & Bakery, and boy, did those tasted good. I found out about this place on Zagat, and it was one of the top rated restaurant in Sonoma County. When I got there, I didn’t see much that I thought was good, with limited baked goods and only a limited selection of sandwiches and other food items. However, the next day, we discovered how good their food really are. The duck sandwich was amazing. It was covered in raisin wheat bread, and the duck was covered in this wonderful plum like sauce, and the duck was chewy. Probably one of the best sandwiches I ever had. The cheese platter and the pate are wonderful as well. It was really a shame though that we did not get to enjoy the food in a true picnic style as it was raining on Thursday, and the weather didn’t really get better, so we had to eat the food in our car. The wonderfulness of the food outweighs however the crummy weather and the fact that we can’t really do a picnic. It was just enough that we are able to enjoy food of such quality, and it doesn’t really matter where we had it or under what conditions we had it.

I welcome you to check out Petaluma if you are ever in the area. I’ll talk more about some of the wineries that I visited in my next blog.