Do you know the way to San Jose?

Thanks Dionne, but we found it. Actually our Continental pilot found SJC.

Stacey and I are rollin' around San Jose and the Santa Cruz mountains (hills I'd call them) in a white Lincoln Towncar (yes we splurged) with about 9k miles on it. We also rented the GPS nav system, just cause we can. The Garmin nuvi device is cool. We were able to create 'favorites' before we left and saved them on our SecureDigital memory card. When we got into the car we just popped in our SD card and brought up the favorites and voila!

Friday afternoon we headed to the main area of San Jose to the J Lohr tasting room for some yummy wines. Some winners and some losers. We still had an hour before the other winery closed for the day, Picchetti. This is the winery in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mtns. that was a possibility for our wedding reception. It also has the peacocks on the grounds.

At Picchetti, we had an energetic employee pouring wines, selling goods, chatting up the 20 or so folks in the area. They had quite a few wines to offer for tasting but they had run out of our favorite Zin as they were down to just a few cases left from their 400 cases produced this year. When Smiley (or something close to that....I think he was a Kiwi) found out we were from Texas and had been there 8 years ago, he threw the '5 tastes' rule out the window. We were able to sample 4 cabernets from the region: 1 cab/merlot blend, 1 100% cab from sea level in Los Altos, 1 100% cab from the top of the Montebello at 3000', and 1 100% cab from the same elevation but blended from the owner's private vines. All were delicious but the later was just amazing and we're coming home with a bottle. We also signed up for their wine club so we'll be able to share some of their wines 4/year. Dad, there's a port (Zin/Petite Syrah) with your name on it coming back on the plane.

After the winery, we headed to our hotel to checkin. A nice all-suite hotel which I've stayed at before when working our here in 2000 -- Larkspur Landing. After 'freshening' up we decided to head to our favorite Sushi Bar/Dance Club/Sake Bomb place near Stanford in Palo Alto -- Miyake. It was just as loud, crowded, happening, and yummy as always. The names were: Stanford Roll (crab, asparagus, tomato) , Google Roll (fried prawn, avocado, spicy tuna), Microsoft Roll (soft shell crab, spicy tuna, lettuce, tobiko), Caribbean Roll (tuna, avocado, wakame), Texas Nigiri (beef, kaiware, garlic, sesame oil, teriyake sauce) and Potsticker Roll. Yuuuuuuuuummmmmmm. After dinner we walked off the rolls with a stroll down University Dr.

We'd have to call that a pretty successful day.

Ciao, S2