Out West - Day 32

Saturday, October 4 - Santa Rosa, CA. Today started out a bit overcast - it rained all night - with a few scattered showers, but the sky began to clear as we got ready to head out for some scouting of the area. We went out in search of a Best Buy, so we could get a web cam for the laptop. I plugged "Best Buy" into the GPS, and it only found 2, but they were 55 miles away!! What the heck? Anyway, we went into Santa Rosa, to the Santa Rosa Plaza, which is a downtown mall, because there was a DELL Direct store there, and we thought we could score a web cam there. However, we discovered that the store had closed recently, so we asked the girl at the Information kiosk if she knew of a Best Buy in the area. We found that, indeed there was, and it was located almost right behind the Fairgrounds, where we are staying.

Saturday afternoon we spent at the Harvest Festival inside the Fairgrounds (across the street from the RV Park). I believe that I mentioned in yesteday's blog about the cost of tastings at the various wineries, so the festival was a great take. It was $4/person to get in, plus $7/person for tickets to the wine tasting. The $7 got you a free wine glass (nice glass, too!), and two tastings inside. Every one of the wineries in Sonoma Valley was represented (over 200 of them), so we got to try several different wines, all in one place! We also visited the Cooking Demonstrations booth, where the chef was demonstrating how to stretch pizza dough, and how to make a simple, delicious pizza (it was dough, butter and a sugar/cinnamon mix). We all got to try some of it and it truly was delicious! Next, he demonstrated how to make pizza on the grill!! This was a very simple thing to do - you only leave the dough on long enough on each side to get it crispy, not black!

After returning to the motor home, I began to work on my laptop, because I can only boot it up in "Safe" mode, due to a graphics driver conflict with Windows Vista (did I mention that I HATE VISTA!!!). If you don't see any entries for a day or so, it's because I have to back up all our pictures and files to CD, then reformat my hard drive and go back to Windows XP.

Tomorrow (Sunday) after Mass, we are heading south to get closer to San Francisco. I hope we will be able to get some good shots there, and will also be able to enter another journal.

Sorry that we do not have any pictures today, but I don't want to put any more on this "p-o-s" computer until I get it working right again.