Day Twenty-one
Calistoga-Napa, 31 miles
Today’s blog should have been short because today was supposed to be simple. Yet here we are with me having something more to say.
I already forget if I waxed on about how nice Calistoga is. A big part of it is the hotel I stayed in, the Mount View Hotel and Spa. The hotel is 100+ years old, fully restored to it’s 1920’s art deco glory. I thought the best part was the price (low) but in addition to the high-line design, the complementary continental breakfast was brought to my room promptly at 7:00 AM. There are two conclusions about this: 1) go to Napa—specifically Calistoga—the day after Labor Day, when price gouging has ceased, and all the people are back at their respective salt mines after their end of summer fling. 2) Stay at the Mount View Hotel.
Continental Breakfast
Calistoga has about 5,000 people, as does St. Helena, about 9 miles south. Both are high design without being pretentious or kitschy. Napa itself sits at about 77,000 and feels much more like a working town, with a bougie downtown that seems out of step with the actual spirit of the larger city, like it was troweled on over the top. If you are familiar with Seattle, it would be like University Village was dropped into the middle of White Center. A clash of contrasts.
The ride, short as it was, was almost all on dedicated bike trails and very pleasant. Napa Valley has a problem in that it has one primary traffic artery—for industry, through traffic, local people and scads of tourists. Getting bikes out of this mix is good for everyone. There are quite a few cyclists, but it’s not the Netherlands. Bikes won’t be taking a lot of cars off the road here, but as a cyclist it is very nice to not be in traffic.
The harvest will be soon. Grapes hang on vines in fat clumps. I mentioned in yesterday’s blog that grape vines are at the peak of their production between 25-50 years. There are a lot of bare fields with huge piles of yanked out grape plants on the far end. This makes sense, since we are about 50 years past when Napa began to take off in the 1970s.
An easy day today, including pedaling about 3 miles past tonight’s hotel because it is on the north side of Napa and Napa is bigger than I thought it was. I was downtown, looking for a place to settle in and write today’s (supposedly) short blog post. The bike has four panniers. My iPad was not in any of them. I checked twice more and no, I hadn’t missed it.
Remember my experience with the junkies in my room at that super shabby motel in Fortuna? After that motel manager had given me the wrong room, I realized I had no idea to whom a manager may have mistakenly given a passkey to my room. I continue to hide my valuables when I leave my motel room. If there is no safe, I stick them between the box spring and mattress at the foot end of the bed. That’s where my iPad was, back in my room at the Mount View in Calistoga.
As I discovered on the Southern Oregon Coast, these small communities all have inter-town bus service. Poking around, I found the Number 10 bus makes the trip up and down the valley every hour. The bus ran right past my Napa hotel, and I had time to ride 3 miles, check in, shower and wash riding clothes before the next one came. The bus was a brand new electric vehicle, so new that the payment pedestal by the driver wasn’t working. Instead of $4, my ride back to Calistoga was free.
I had called the hotel manager to say where I had hidden my iPad. When I got to the front desk, Dylan from last night was there, and so was my iPad. Meanwhile, the bus was waiting 20 minutes at the Calistoga Park and Ride before returning to Napa. I had time to down a locally brewed lager before catching the same bus on its return trip south, the same bus that couldn’t take money, so my whole trip was free, except for the beer.
The Napa Valley is a foodie paradise, because people like to eat great food with great wine. Getting off the bus, I walked just 20 steps into an excellent Italian Restaurant, and was offered a seat at the bar, since it was just me, no reservation required. I ordered a nice Cabernet Sauvignon to pair with my rigatoni and meatballs, but the main course, as has happened so frequently on this trip, turned out to be the conversation with the person sitting next to me, in this case Michael.
Michael is a self-trained polymath who has done everything from construction to commercial fishing to his current profession—audio-visual production for conferences and events in and around Napa. His kids are grown with professions of their own, with one daughter following in his footsteps as an AV producer.
Michael lived in San Francisco and learned to drive, at age 12, on those hills.
His father had recently died and he needed to get a job to help the family. Dad’s car was just sitting there so he would drive it to work. This kid behind the wheel was always getting pulled over. Since he was driving without a license, the penalty was to suspend his license. But he was too young to get a license to suspend, so was he really driving with a suspended license? He kept driving to work. When he went to take the driver’s test at 16, he was told he couldn’t get a license because his license was suspended. This went on for years, until he was 30, when enough time had passed since the most recent suspension of the license he didn’t have, that he was allowed to take the tests and finally get his driver’s license.
Michael and a buddy bought an old Boston Whaler boat because fishing permits follow the boat. They’d head out under the Golden Gate to fish because they liked being on the ocean, presumably keeping some and selling the rest. He said fishing has been declining, but recently, Chinook salmon are finding their way up the Napa River again. Big fish! Some may be strays but many definitely hatched here and are returning home. Steady efforts to restore riparian areas are paying off.
This speaks to how cooperative efforts to preserve open space and land husbandry make a difference. In the 1960s, Napa County was the first county in the country to designate agriculture, in this case vineyards and wine making, as the highest use of land, rather than industry and sprawling subdivisions. Farmers are not taxed on the value of their property as if they would chop it up and sell it to developers. Towns are pinned in by law and sprawl is limited. I’m sure this has an impact on housing prices, which creates its own set of problems, but the result is that the Napa Valley is not San Jose. This dovetails with other efforts here—dedicated bike trails, restoring fish habitat, the “Napa Wine Train” that gets more visitors out of their cars, and the emphasis on organic farming. All these speak to an intentionality for community-in-place that shows what can be done anywhere when people decide it’s important work together.
I have finalized my route over the next few days to land me in San Jose on Saturday. My plan to do one more Missoula shuttle before completing my ride down California. There’s a lot to do back home to complete our move to our new home, and Joan shouldn’t have to do it alone. [Editors note: much appreciated! ❤️]
For some nefarious reason, airfares are through the roof right now, and connections between the Bay Area and Missoula are crazy complicated. I discovered that I can take Amtrak to Seattle and then to Whitefish, Montana, in a sleeper cabin, for about the same price as flying, and trains are so much more fun. So here’s what I’ll do: tomorrow night I’ll camp at China Camp State Park in Marin. On Friday I’ll ride over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, and work my way down the west side of the bay towards Burlingame or Palo Alto. On Saturday evening I’ll hop on the Coast Starlight heading north, and on Sunday I’ll grab the Empire Builder out of Seattle on it’s eastward journey through Montana.
After a week in Missoula, I’ll figure out how to return to San Jose to finish the final 10 days of riding to the California/Mexico border, to complete my bicycle circumnavigation of the contiguous USA. Another benefit of this last pause of the ride is that California’s interior remains very, very hot. South of Monterey, the coastal route, California Highway 1, is still closed for repairs following a massive landslide a couple of years back. The coast weather is cool but just inland, like up here in Northern California, temperatures soar. By late September, temperatures are at least theoretically supposed to be lower. Today’s extended forecast suggests that in Paso Robles, for instance, daytime highs will be in the low to mid ‘80s, rather than over 100 like it was last weekend. I’m stretching the trip out once again because that’s just how this year’s adventure is shoehorned in among other life priorities. Sometimes it’s easy to organize, and other times, it takes a bit more craft and patience.
