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If you didn't attend the wine tour, you missed a GREAT weekend. We didn't have any rain, just a short period of heavy mist late Saturday afternoon. We Rendezvoused in Irvine and then caravaned up to Ventura for our first gas stop. There were 5 cars from San Diego (Jeff Hixson, Chuck Miller, Minh Duong, Craig Wright, and a friend of ours, Ezra Szoke), and 13 or so from Orange County COCOA. Every car was different, which made things interesting. The first peasant surprise was getting through LA with virtually no traffic. We didn't have to spend any effort staying together and all arrived in Ventura within a couple of minutes of each other. From there we proceeded to the "Cold Springs Tavern", an old stage coach stop between Santa Barbara and Santa Inez, where we had lunch. It was built in 1886, very rustic and picturesque

We then proceed on up into the wine country and visited the Gainy and Sunstone wineries. Most of the wines we sampled were white at the two stops as the Cabernets and Pinots were grown a little further north where we would be on Sunday.

We then went up to the Santa Maria Inn, which was very pleasant, and had a covered parking garage where we could clean our cars and keep them dry overnight if it rained.

The the Inn it was about a 15 minute drive to dinner at the "Hitching Post" restaurant, just outside Vandenburg. They served excellent, good value meals off the grill. Their steaks were large but no large enough for Jeff, so in keeping with his reputation, he ordered a special cut 20 oz. ribeye, and had no trouble putting it away.

The next morning the San Diego crowd drove up to Jocko's for a Big Butt breakfast. We also purchased 20 pounds of bacon to bring home. If you haven't been to Jocko's you have missed one of the better steak places in the west.

We visited three wineries Sunday morning, Sisquac, Firestone, and Curtis, where they were sampling more red wines. I think the most popular were the last two places we visited which were the Firestone and Curtis Vineyards. I'll bet the group spent about 3 grand between those two vineyards.

Our last stop was the River Grill Restuarant in Solvang, where we had a pleasant, but chilly, lunch on the patio with a beautiful view of the green Solvang Valley.

The trip back to San Diego was also smooth with no significant traffic trough LA. We arrived back in San Diego in about 3 hours from Solvang. We meet a lot of nice people from the Orange County COCOA, drank some great wines, had wonderful meals and drove through some gorgeous back country. What more could you ask for? We all agreed that we would be ready to do it again next year. Are you?