Hi everyone! It's been awhile since I've updated my website, but that's because I was on a quick Spring Break vacation. We visited California's Central Coast - San Luis Obispo - and went to a bunch of wineries. It was our "Sideways" trip! Southern California is also famous for its desert wildflowers that bloom every March, so we were lucky to catch some beautiful flowers! Below are some pictures of the beautiful open winding roads flanked by purple, orange, and yellow wildflowers in bloom right now. There was no traffic which really put us in a zen mode because traffic in LA is so congested! Also is a pic of, of course, my travel bear Bartlett next to some wildflowers.

Most of the traditional wineries are really pretty - the tasting rooms are in these classy, very gorgeous buildings and they are surrounded by vineyards and rolling hills - many weddings happen at these vineyards. Below are some photos of your typical tasting rooms and wineries in the area. We also found a gourmet grocery store and bought some prosciutto, mortadella, and genoa salami and fresh bread and we eat that in the car as we drive from winery to winery (I just rip up the bread and make these little sandwiches in the car) so that was our lunch during the day.

We also visited the east side of Los Robles and found these very artsy, cool, almost "scrappy" little wineries that are much less "commercial" and yuppie and had really cool owners who talked with us for quite a bit instead of just giving us a wine tasting and not saying much beyond "This is our blend of 40 percent merlot, 20 percent syrah, and 60 percent cab franc with a peppery finish..." LOL.

We were at one winery where the owner is a professional chef trained in France. He and his wife fell in love with the area and bought a fixer upper winery where they raise their own chickens and guinea fowl and roosters. They do not eat their birds - they raise them to lay eggs. The wife loves the birds so much that she named the birds and saved the first eggs they laid (check out Bartlett with the birds and the decorated egg shells she kept with the names of their birds painted on them!) The husband sells his own gourmet pasta sauces, so we bought a pork ragu and a red pepperonata sauce that had whole hard boiled guinea fowl eggs inside the jar! The wife even graciously gave us three guinea fowl eggs, insisting we take them home and fry 'em up. We had a fridge in our Best Western hotel room, so the eggs were safely stocked in the fridge! We fried them up when we returned home - they were delicious!

We also visited this very rustic winery which was bought by a guy who used to play for the Detroit Tigers in 1963. Having lived in Detroit as a newspaper reporter in the early 90s, I was excited to hear about the Detroit connection. The wife then told us about the winery's crazy history - they bought it because it had gotten RAIDED... apparently during the '80s when Reagan did his war on drugs, growing marijuana became the big industry in the States so the original building's owners decided to grow their own pot. The tasting room was originally where all the pot was grown! The Tiger and his wife spent two years trying to fix up this building which was a MESS when they bought it - it was a real fixer upper! In fact they kept the bullet holes from the FBI raid - so I have some photos of Bartlett by the bullet holes (red wall). They turned it into this gorgeous winery and basically erased its rather sordid past with some award-winning wine!

The final winery we saw on our trip so far was this very artsy winery owned by a rather Goth woman. She has wigs that people can put on and take silly pictures of themselves. The owner is a professional artist and sculptor, so we took a lot of pictures of all the crazy sculpture gardens and homemade tile furniture pieces she made. It was a really pretty place. So you will see some funny pictures of me in a wig and some crazy sculptures.

It was a nice escape for a few days and now I'm back, writing away in the writing batcave! Hope you enjoy these fun pictures...