The wine is bottled poetry. ---Napa Valley sign.

It's three years since Gerhard died.

I'm one pound down, and let's not talk about anything else.

In the Great Cache Race, G&V will catch us at 1430 by the end of July. Eeek. Don, who has passed them again, would catch us next year. If they're aiming for our leader, they catch him next April 1. They never will catch the Bay Area leaders.

In an effort to drive that date back a little, we went to Napa Valley today. First we started by visiting the AAA office and picking up a bunch of maps. Then it was to South Natomas (Sacramento) to a park where we'd missed one the other day. There were no girls lollygagging under the cache tree this time, so we snagged it right away.

On the way, then, we stopped at the Vacaville Outlets and found the recently-moved (two years ago) Black&Decker outlet. Rich is looking for the mower bag for his new mower. Well, they don't have it in the outlet store, they have it in the little shop 1.5 miles away from our house!! While we were there we looked around and drooled over a number of things, bought some filters for our old dustbuster, and I had an epiphany when I realized the scumbuster doesn't have to be limited to the bathroom! Who knew? I got some kitchen-only brushes (they didn't say that, *I* say that) and maybe it'll work on the burnt-in noodles I put into the Corning pot yesterday. (OTOH, those pans are at least 15 years old, and I could, likely, replace them.)

Then on into Napa. We looked at a couple of caches, one with someone parked right by it, another with a construction crew working on the bike trail, so we left the area and went to Westwood Hills park. There are three caches up there, and it's quite a nice hike. We spied some travel bugs and traded one. One of the caches is a soap opera, and some of the people have the idea. I added a couple of sentences to the story.

By the time we got the third cache, it was definitely time for lunch. We thought we'd go back to the nice cafe we went to in Yountville before... well! Yountville has gone all boutiquey! (Update: in the Sunday paper there was an article about all the Yountville restaurants!) We looked at Bistro Jeanty, but Rich didn't hear me as we were heading in after the maitre-d' to the effect "do you want to leave?" He looked at the menu, expensive but more importantly time-consuming meals, and decided we could leave before the water came.

This was NOT the cafe of our memory! We ended up at Vintage 1870, a former winery-now-shopping center, at Pacific Blue, quite nice. Afterwards we went to a grape-crusher where there was a microcache. And so northwards to the former Christian Brothers winery, Graystone, now the Culinary Institute of America. This was the first winery we ever went to in Napa Valley and the one we always took all our visitors to. Now they're a museum on the ground floor with a huge collection of Brother Timothy's corkscrews. Also, there's the virtual cache, about the original cornerstone with the 7 bottles of Napa Valley wine that were put in with it, and later cemented in when they pumped concrete into the walls to help in an earthquake.

From there we went up to the east, the Vaca Mountains (?) to the booming metropolis of Angwin. We'd never heard of Angwin, but they have a college... and a cache. We found the other one en route, on a guard rail, then went back to highway 29. There's one along the bike trail next to a Beringer vineyard. This took some time and a lot of cussing of HAL, but eventually Rich found it, hidden in a "rock."

There's another in St. Helena, in a little park next to a pond. The pond had a couple of swans and cygnets. Closer to the cache, I spied a little frog (and since the cache was named for a frog that seemed appropriate.) Rich found this one by jumping the fence and semi-crawling under the bridge.

Next was one named for the Napa River Ecological Reserve. It was actually on the guardrail outside this, but we could park there. I want to come back someday and look more carefully at the reserve.

The cache called "No Whiners" is on a train near a Wine Train station. Then we went into Napa itself and looked for a MASH cache. No luck with that one, nor with the one which was on the bike trail that we'd skipped in the morning. I must write that cache-placer and see if she can give us a hint. Finally, we went back for the fourth time to the most popular parking place in Napa, and left a travel bug and picked up a TB.

I wanted to see if I'd figured out the puzzle on Hopeless Diamond, and I probably have the north coordinate but not the west one. We'll try this one again.

We started home. It was still light when we got to Davis so we tried again on a multi we missed the other day. I had completely flaked out and said the last digit of "3600" is "6", which really got us to the wrong place for the second stage. This time we were looking and looking in the right place, and suddenly I spied it, a cord around the base of a lamppost. This has the coordinates in it. So we managed to find the last stage, and erase another purple frownie.

We drove out of Davis past Gerhard's old house, empty again, sold for almost $100,000 more than when I sold it! Of course, I thought of him, dying there only three years ago.

I noted when we filled the gastank, that we've gone 30,000 miles this last year in the car. Wow.

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I never much liked Nancy R. in fact, I disliked her intensely, before I had Hillary to compare her to. I certainly admire her this week, and for the years previous. I had thought she was shallow, but she has a great depth of character.

"I think that people understood that Reagan madly loved his wife, but they didn�t quite know why. She was brittle and steely; whatever personal warmth she had didn�t come across on camera. She wasn�t a Hollywood knockout. But he was nuts about her, and he had his reasons. She repaid him with the long twilight vigil. She endured sadness you can only hope you never know, and in the end she wasn't hanging on the arm of a Marine like wet crepe. She looked as if she could have helped Jackson to his feet if he�d wilted in the heat."

Hmmm. (via Polipundit Jaysen, who has pertinent comments.)