Six Days in Calistoga, CA

31Oct2014

Happy Halloween!!

It’s been a great week in Calistoga and the weather has been in the high 70s and low 80s.  The rain arrived today but we’re good with that.  Tomorrow we will be pulling out to head further south to Chowchilla, CA for just a couple of days.  Our aim is to only do two, 2-day stay-overs a couple of times in a row, then find a place to spend a week.  We did three of these two-day stints to start out and it can get pretty exhausting.

I  was a bit doubtful of Calistoga when we got here. Eating out here is pretty expensive.  However, we found that there are 3-4 restaurants that have really good happy hour deals.  So instead of eating out, we snacked out!  It’s worked our pretty good since our favorite place so far has been Bosko’s Trattoria.  Napa wines can be extraordinarily good but also extraordinarily expensive.  During Bosko’s happy hour from 4:30 – 6:30 pm you can get any of their select wines for $6 per glass.  The average prices during non-happy hour are between $10 and $18 per glass.  Plus they have some pretty good appetizers for reasonable prices. (Boskos)

Huge petrified Sequoia - See the tree growing out of it?

We did some of the "touristy" things in the area.  I found the petrified redwood forest particularly fascinating!  (http://petrifiedforest.org/)





This was actually the tallest petrified tree

Side view of tree growing out of petrified wood

We  also visited the local geyser.  Those of you have seen the geyser in Yellowstone would probably have laughed.  It sprays about 60 feet in the air about every 30 minutes.  I found it entertaining because it would bubble and burp every few minutes to keep you on your toes for the real eruption that lasted about 3-4 minutes.  I feel it was worth the money spent.   (http://oldfaithfulgeyser.com/ )




For those of you who've seen the movie "Bottle Shock" (which we own and watch at least every other month), below is a picture of  where the movie was filmed.  It's based on a true story, although we found from the person serving tastes that it was embellished a bit.  It's much more beautiful in person than it was on the movie.


Chateau Montelena

We had our real first challenge getting our mail shipped to somewhere close to us. The place we are staying in Calistoga is actually part of the Napa County Fairgrounds and the manning of the office is very sporadic (i.e. weren’t sure if we would actually get our mail here), so we felt we should find a UPS store. 

 

On Monday we realized that we should stock up on some groceries and needed to look for a UPS store (see previous blog).  Calistoga only has a small boutique grocery store that’s pretty expensive. So, we used Garmin to find the closest Safeway which is in Santa Rosa about 10 miles away.  While at Safeway, we noted a UPS store in the shopping center.  Great, we thought, we’ll just get our mail sent there.  When we got back to the motor home, we got on the internet to find the address for the UPS store.  We made a note and Mike call the Bend UPS store where we are receiving our mail and gave them the address we found for Santa Rosa.  We were told that our mail would arrive Wednesday afternoon.  According to the timing we went back to Santa Rosa and followed the directions to the UPS store.  Alas, no mail.  I used Garmin to double check the UPS store address in Santa Rosa and alas!  There were three locations!  Hmm what to do now.  We called the UPS store in Bend and asked them for the address where the mail was supposed to go.  The young lady replied, “it was the address you gave to us”.  I tried to suppress my angst and asked her to confirm the address she had on file since we found there are actually 3 locations in Santa Rosa.  As she verified it, we realized it was not the one next to the Safeway we had gone to.  Here’s where I have to say again, “Thank you for the Garmin!!”  We found the UPS store where the mail had gone and it was there.  Whew and yea!!  Success!!

We also had our first test to see how our set up with Wal-Mart for prescriptions would work.  We went to the nearest store in Santa Rosa (again).  Mike went to the counter and spoke to the person there.  They were able to find him in their system and said they could certainly have his prescription filled and it would be ready by Friday.  (They were true to their word.)  However, while we were in the store, we looked at Garmin for vehicles and found a reasonably priced one.  We’ve been so happy with the RV one that we "just had to" get one for the Jeep (where we don’t have to take the safe routes that the RV Garmin provides us). 

So tomorrow we’ll be on our way further south.  We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Katherine and Mike Rossman

P.S.  I appreciate any input from you on whether the blog is getting too wordy or boring.  After all, I want to keep you interested and entertained!!