03.16.05
Keypoint Retreat
Hot off finals week was the Keypoint Credit Union spring retreat. Keith is on the board, and for anyone politically inclined, this is a great gig. In exchange for sitting through (presumably boring) meetings about the running of the credit union, Keypoint treats its board members, and committee members well. We get a nice gift basket during the holidays, and they do off-site retreats twice a year in nice places. I’m not sure if all credit unions are as posh, but anyone can join a credit union board for just a little effort.
This year was in Napa Valley at Harvest Inn in St. Helena. Although it rained most of the time, it was lovely.
Technically, the retreat only pays for actual board members, travel, room and entertainment. But one person or two doesn’t really matter, so as long as we pay for my travel, Keypoint is OK to pick up the rest. Several of the board members bring their significant others, or even their children.
The schedule usually goes: Saturday morning breakfast, then meeting; board lunch; free time; fancy dinner; occasional Sunday event; go home. Keith and I try to arrive by Friday night, and sometimes we stay an extra day on either side.
This time, I didn’t drive up with Keith, because my friend Barbi and I were supposed to see Evita. I say supposed to, because the timing of my last final, plus traffic caused me to be too late to catch the BART on time. So we had dinner instead. We went to an Italian place that Barbi’s wanted to go to for a while, and it was very nice. One room had these beautiful neon jellyfish. She gave me a lovely scarf and travel bag for my trip to Japan.
Luminous jellyfish swim above the heads of diners.
Keith carpooled with Tim, the cool Chairman of the Board, and his lovely wife Linda. I drove Keith’s car and came up after dinner. It was rainy, but not too bad.
I don’t have to go to the meeting, but I still get up early on Saturday in order to get a free breakfast. This time they just used Harvest Inn’s free breakfast, so I was able to take my time. Plus there was a great view.
View from Breakfast room at Harvest inn.
I wanted to collect the elongated pennies from two local attractions. Keith had expressed a disinterest in joining me, so I went by myself.
The Petrified Forest required a $6 entry fee, which annoyed me, but it was very pretty. It was Spring in a forested part of Napa, so it would have been pretty anyway, despite the intermittent rain. But the petrified wood was very interesting, too. I’ve been to the petrified forest in Arizona (or somewhere around there), but these were different trees. Mostly they were redwood trees, and the petrification managed to capture even the texture of the bark.
A pine among redwoods. Continuing excavation. Close-up of a tree. Look at the texture!
Apparently, long ago there was a volcano on the order of Mt. St. Helens nearby that erupted and buried these trees in ash. Ash and water formed the necessary chemicals to petrify the fallen trees. They can tell where the volcano was because the trees all point away from it.
Altogether, it was a very pleasant walk which captured the beauty of spring and the history of the ages.
The other attraction is “Old Faithful” geyser of Calistoga. That wanted an $8 entrance fee, but the machine was in the gift shop outside the entrance, so I didn’t have to pay. Around that time, Keith called to say they were done with the meeting, but had no lunch, so I went and got him. He seemed a bit put out that I had not dragged him along, and I suppose regarding the Petrified Forest, he was justified.
We had lunch at a cafe that served crepes. The crepes were good, but the service needed work. I didn’t receive the coffee I ordered, and they didn’t check up on us. Maybe they spruced up for dinner, thus warranting the limousine parking spots outside.
We also visited the local grist mill, an historic local site. A local land baron had the forethought to install industries useful to the agrarian times, but after he passed, his wife had a hard time keeping it. It passed through a couple of hands before becoming a California State Park and Historical Site. They have a small gift shop, where they sell agrarian-type items and various flour from the mill.
The central workings of the mill.
We didn’t feel like doing any wine tasting, deciding to save that for tomorrow or Monday, so we headed back to clean up for dinner.Dinner was fabulous. We ate at the Merryvale Cask Room in the Merryvale Winery, with food from Tra Vigne next door. It was a paired dinner with a wine for every course. Sometimes when we eat at places with a theme, the food is pretty bad because the real attraction is the place. This food however, was great, and the wines were good, too. Our group filled maybe only half the quatity they can serve at the cask room, it’s immense. The entrance is flanked by two enormous casks so big, that one of them holds a dining area that seats eight comfortably! The walls are lined with giant casks stacked three deep and the room faces an enormous fire place.
Glamorous and fabulous, we received a tour of the winery before dining in the Cask Room.
Plenty of cute couples: Keith and I, Linda and Tim, Pandy and Jeremy, and many more.
After dinner, we could buy wine from the winery at a discount. Keith and I tend to drink reds, but we use whites in cooking, so we needed some. I told Keith to buy two bottles of the tasty Chardonnay from dinner without realizing they were $45 apiece! Oh, well, now we have really nice white wine for things.
The following day, Keypoint arranged a tour with Safari West, an open range preserve of African animals. A guide drives groups around in a big covered jeep. There were even a few seats on the roof, which the kids quickly climbed up to. Most of us preferred to be rain-free, although we were all welcome to free rain ponchos as part of the tour. They had cute animals on them. Our guide was African, and I think all the guides were. He had spent his younger days as a song and dance man on Broadway and Las Vegas. At one point he sang a “Happy Birthday” song in his native tongue, which I think was Swahili. Sadly in my quest for esthetics, I made the movie sideways (it framed better), and I don’t know how to rotate it.
Our jeep slogged away on them muddy tracks of the preserve, and we saw a variety of animals, including antelope, deer, cape buffalo (very mean), and ostriches. The dirt roads were too bad to see the zebras, in fact we got stuck for a while near the cape buffalo. It was only reluctantly that the guide, Ephraim (I think), suggested we get out of the jeep to make it light enough to maneuver. If we had been within sight of them, I don’t think he would have let us do it. Ephraim told us several stories of the mean-spirited nature of cape buffalo.
Later we did a walking tour of the smaller enclosures. There we saw a variety of tropical birds in the apiary, giraffes, and cheetahs. There is an enclosure of small gazelles next to the cheetahs, so we were able to see the hunting behavior of the cheetahs without any damage being done. It was very cool. They served us lunch, then we returned to the hotel. Technically the retreat was over, but Keith and I decided to stay another day.
The evening of the tour, we had massages, and ate out at a nice steak place. I won’t get a lot of opportunities to eat beef in Japan, I’m told, so I want to take every opportunity now.
Monday we packed up, but still didn’t feel much like wine (unfortunately), so we casually headed our way for home. We cruised past Whitehall winery, which features in several of the pictures of Vicky Asp at the Stone Griffin Gallery. We stopped at the Napa historical museum, which was free on Mondays. That was a good thing, because it wasn’t worth the four bucks they normally charge. Bo-ring.
Then we went to COPIA, the Center for the education of food, wine and the arts (or something like that, it certainly didn’t spell C.O.P.I.A.) It was a bit pretentious for our tastes and full of a lot of questionable art by a Swedish couple, but it was worth visiting once. They had some interesting displays, including a lot of interactive features. There was a restaurant dedicated to (and maybe designed by) the late, great, Julia Childs. There was a deli, and a gift shop. Best of all was the gardens out front, which supplied a lot of the vegetables, fruit and herbs used in the cooking at the restaurant. We started on a tour of it, but dropped out after it started to rain.
Then we went home to comfort our bereft cats. It was a good weekend. I look forward to the next one.