I have lots to say about our trip to NOLA, believe me. I just have to find the time and energy to write it all up.
Category: Trips
Off to New Orleans
Note: we may or may not actually visit the Treme, but you get the idea.
Now stop what you're doing and freak out
New Orleans and the Final Four, here we come!
"Rommel, you magnificent bastard…I read your book!"
Last week I did a 36-hour trip to San Francisco, one of my very favourite cities. It was for work, alas, and I didn’t get to see or do all — or anything, really — that I would have liked, but it was still quite nice. Here’s how it went:
- 5+ hour flight to SFO, during which I watched Se7en (for the quillionth time) and several episodes of Portlandia (for the first time)
- 6+ hour vendor meeting, which actually went better than you would normally expect with a 6+ hour vendor meeting
- Dinner at L’Appart, a fantastic French restaurant up in San Anselmo. I had Shrimp Napoleon and cassoulet and crème brûlée, and shared in the flowing bottles of Bordeaux and Cotes du Rhone. It was like being back in Juilley.
- Heavy, zonked, lights-out sleep at the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins in Nob Hill
- Relaxing morning, including a walk around the city (and by ‘a walk’ I mean ‘climbing up and down a million hills’), a Starbucks stop and returning to my room to sit in the window, drink my coffee and read the New York Times
- 5+ hour flight to YYZ, during which I watched Patton (imdb | rotten tomatoes) for the first time. I’ve always put off watching it because it’s so long, but when you have five hours to kill a 182-minute movie comes in handy.
I would have loved to spend more time in the city, or take a side trip up to Napa, but it just wasn’t happening. Still, 24 hours in northern California in February is better than no hours at all.
Crescent City
Last Friday we got together with our friends CBJ+M at C’est What, in our quest to reacquaint them with Toronto’s best beer joints. We were also doing a tiny bit of preparation for an upcoming trip we’re taking together: the NCAA Final Four in New Orleans. This will be my first time back since 2000, back when I had no idea how to travel, so I’m treating this like pretty much my first time there. For Nellie it really is her first time.
For quite a while I was excited mainly about watching the games, and will be doubly so if Duke should make it to the final four. But lately, as I read more about the city, and think about how the city comes across in Treme (obviously a fictional and romanticized version, but less so with a David Simon TV show than most) I’m getting more excited about New Orleans itself. It won’t be our biggest trip this year, and may not even be our most interesting (we’re returning to Europe in the summer) but it’s shaping up to be the most fun.
The downside of planning this trip? I can’t get Johnny Horton out of my damn head.
That settles it, we need a bigger place
Yup, I know we just got back from a 3-week trip and our to-do list is still blazing out of control, but the hell with it…we felt like driving down to Niagara and stocking up on wine for the fall and winter. The weather gods were certainly with us — it was a beautiful, sunny fall weekend. We hit nine (!) wineries on Saturday and had an amazing lunch at Stone Road Grille as well as dinner at On The Twenty, across the street from the Inn On The Twenty in Jordan where we stayed. The soup we had at the former and the duck at the latter were among the best things I’ve eaten all year.
On Sunday we had a bit of a stroll on the Twenty Valley Trail, and then visited seven more wineries, including Vineland Estates — where we ate yet another spectacular meal. After pillaging the region for all it was worth we drove home, dropped the car and produced the final tally:
- Calamus 2009 Gewurztraminer
- Calamus 2010 Pinot Gris
- Cave Spring 2008 CSV Riesling
- Creekside 2007 Shiraz
- Creekside 2007 Laura’s Red
- Featherstone 2010 Four Feathers
- Flat Rock 2008 Chardonnay
- Hidden Bench 2008 Felseck Vineyard Chardonnay
- Hidden Bench 2009 Nuit Blanche
- Kacaba 2008 Cabernet Franc
- Kacaba 2008 Meritage
- Lailey 2008 Cabernet
- Lailey 2008 Old Vines Chardonnay
- Le Clos Jordanne 2009 Village Reserve Pinot Noir (x2)
- Le Clos Jordanne 2009 Le Clos Vineyard Pinot Noir
- Le Clos Jordanne 2009 Claystone Terrace Chardonnay
- Le Clos Jordanne 2009 Village Reserve Chardonnay (x2)
- Malivoire 2007 Moira Pinot Noir
- Malivoire 2010 Pinot Gris
- Megalomaniac 2008 Bravado Cabernet Sauvignon (x2)
- Southbrook 2008 Triomphe Cabernet Sauvignon
- Southbrook 2004 Poetica Chardonnay
- Staff 2009 Cabernet Merlot
- Staff 2008 Riesling
- Stratus 2008 Voignier
- Stratus 2008 Sauvignon Blanc
- Stratus 2006 White
- Stratus 2007 White
- Stratus 2010 Red Ice Wine
- Thirty Bench 2008 Cabernet Franc (x3)
- Twenty Twenty Seven Cellars 2009 Queenston Road Pinot Noir
- Vineland Estates 2010 Pinot Meunier
- Vineland Estates 2008 Pinot Blanc
We had two purposes on this trip: stock up for the winter, but also try some places for the first time. Calamus, Creekside, Featherstone/2027, Kacaba, Lailey, Malivoire, Staff and Vineland Estates were all first-time visits for us. Flat Rock and Megalomaniac were more proximity plays since we had to drive right past them to get to others on our list and we knew each had wines we wanted to pick up. Hidden Bench, Jackson-Triggs (for the Clos Jordanne), Southbrook, Stratus and Thirty Bench are practically must-hits whenever we’re in the area. And, in case you’re wondering, Cave Spring only happened because it’s the house winery at Inn On The Twenty and we felt bad leaving without one.
I’d classify most of the new places as good, not great. Only Kacaba really wowed us…their reds were terrific, and very reasonably priced. And it wasn’t even in our original plans for this weekend — several people responded to my tweet announcing our agenda, telling us not going to Kacaba would be a miss. They were right, and we left with two bottles. And there may be a case in our future. I should also point out that we didn’t spend nearly enough time at Vineland tasting their wine; we just tried three in the few minutes before our lunch reservation, but liked two of them enough to buy bottles, so more investigation is probably warranted.
And now, the classic follow-up problem…where do we put all this freaking wine?!?
Day 18: One for the road
Well, here we were with a day with no plans. Nothing we had to do but pack before we left the next day. We had a whole day in Sydney, one of the world’s great cities, to do whatever we wanted. So what would we do? What could we do?
Eat and drink more stuff, naturally.
The brother dropped me off at the Bourke Street Bakery to pick up some tasty breakfast. I walked home enjoying the sunshine (actual sunshine!) and woke up Nellie. We decided to do a little shopping (Nellie bought a new bag) and then hit up the one last beer place on our list: the King Street Brewhouse.
We enjoyed a few pints on a beautiful sunny afternoon by the water…which, I think, is how all last days in Sydney should be spent. I did have to fight off a few seagulls (and one managed to nick a fry even so) to protect our lunch…our last wildlife encounter.
We stopped for one more pint at the Redoak, then jumped a train home and got our bags packed. We enjoyed our last afternoon and evening at home with the brother, eating a nice meal in the back yard, drinking wine from the Margaret River, chasing away feline interlopers, looking up at the stars and listening to something rather substantial creep stealthily along the fence.
Boom. Australia. That happened.
Day 16 & 17: …le déluge
Rainy. Windy. Grey. Nothing doing this day except to relax.
We considered a swim in the sea, but it was a little too rough. Pretty, but rough. We settled for wading along the edge of the surf.
We even went for a dip in the pool; everyone thought we were nuts, but wet is wet, and we might as well get a swim in. Apart from that all we did was drink wine on our deck, read, nap, write and hang out in the bar. It’s too bad we didn’t have nice weather, but it was probably good to have some forced relaxation. We needed it.
The following day was even greyer, rainier and windier…too wet to even sit on our deck. So: shuttle back to Cairns, beer at Blue Sky Brewery in Cairns airport, flight back to Sydney, et voila: home (kinda) again.
Day 15: Après moi…
Slept in. Awoke to warm breezes and strange bird sounds. Ate breakfast here. No big deal.
Went for a bit of a hike down to the second beach, much rockier and wilder than the other. We climbed around the rocks, and saw tidal pools with crabs and cuttlefish scurrying about. We’d hoped to kayak around a bit that morning but the wind was too high.
Windy or not, we were still getting pretty damned warm and sweaty. By the time we walked back up the hill to the main lodge we knew we needed a dip to cool off, so into the ocean we went.
After a bit of relaxation back at the room, we thought…what the heck, another swim? Why not, right? This time we went to the pool just up the hill, sprawled out and read for a bit, and then had a swim. Not a bad venue either.
After drying off from that excursion we had a leisurely lunch of meats, fruits and cheeses on the front deck of our cabin. The weather was perfect…sunny and warm, but with shade and a cool breeze to keep things bearable.
Still, it did get quite warm by the afternoon so we turned to the water once more, this time opting for a smaller, shadier pool near the beach. It was deserted, and incredibly refreshing.
The rest of our afternoon was spent sitting on our balcony, cleaning sand from our feet, drinking wine, enjoying the views, getting ready for dinner and listening to bush turkeys scratch around in the scrub below. That evening the plan was to take the shuttle into Port Douglas for dinner.
We walked around the town, which took about…oh, ten minutes. Not an enormous place, Port Douglas. We sat at Iron Bar and had a few schooners, listening to a great chattering flock of birds shriek from the trees at the oncoming night. We walked down Wharf Street and chose a spot on an empty patio. Just one glass of wine later the restaurant we were in, and practically the entire row of restaurants on the street, was overflowing.
For our part, we had dinner at Harrison’s, one of the nicer places on the strip. Our server (who was from Montreal!) was a little slow off the mark — we guessed that she was new — but the meal was wonderful. It accelerated a little toward the end as we had to dash to catch our shuttle back to Thala, though.
By this time the wind was really starting to pick up — it had blown several coconuts off the trees and on to the roof over us during dinner — and spoiled our plans for one last swim when we got back to the lodge. Whatever, though…there was no way around the fact that we’d just had a vacation day for the ages.
Day 14: bienvenue a la jungle
We got up early, but we had a very good reason: we were flying to Cairns to stay at Thala Beach Lodge. We’d decided to build some downtime into our schedule, and booked in at this quiet lodge near Port Douglas.
It was quite unlike the other very beach-y, very tourist-y resorts we passed on the way up. In fact, someone in our shuttle (bound for one of those beach-y, tourist-y places) sniffed, “It’s a bit jungly, innit?” as we pulled up.
We had lunch in the restaurant and a drink in the bar while we waited for our cabin to be prepped. This, by the way, is the view from the bar:
By the time we got to our cabin I was pretty much dying from the heat. It was practically tropical here, and I was still dressed in the jeans and shirt I put on in Sydney that morning. Once we got into some cooler clothes we headed down to the beach. Our cabin was a few minutes’ walk up a hill from the beach, but what it lacked in sandy nearness it made up in convenience of getting to the main lodge. Not to mention the view:
Not that the beach wasn’t worth the walk. We got to see lots of lizards on the way down. We also saw lots of animals on the beach: tiny molluscs of some kind that would wash in on the surf and immediately bury themselves in the sand. We could see it happening as we walked up and down the beach (during which time Nellie suffered another soaker). What a beach it was too…just incredible.
We walked back up to the cabin; I stayed in and cooled down while Nellie checked out the pool. I wasn’t good looking enough to hang out at that pool. It’s where all the resort’s hot people were hanging out. We did return to the sea for a quick swim at sundown which, it turns out, might not be the best time to swim there given the potential for sharks and saltwater crocodiles. But man, if you could have seen that sunset, you would have swum out there too.
After the dip we watched a bit of the Rugby World Cup semifinal and went for dinner. Dinner was quite good, even if the starter showed up at the same time as the mains for some reason. No matter; the food was good, the wine was good, the setting was extraordinary and the walk home barely stretched our legs.
Now this was vacation.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 