We love a good trip to wine country, especially when that means we have lots of outdoor room and a COVID safe place to stay. We’ve been struggling with finding a trip where we can bounce around locally because we have a baby that can’t be vaccinated. We accidentally teed-up our return to the outside world with California’s re-opening but we were still pretty happy with our experiences and planning ahead made a huge difference in having a great experience. Here was a mini recap of our day. An editorial note: my parents were there to babysit so we had our first adult, outdoor meal for two in many months.
Breakfast at Long Meadow Ranch’s Cafe
It’s hard to say what the order is here because they change up their menu frequently (in a good way). This time I was lucky enough to stumble upon the best gluten free biscuit I’ve ever had. In the fall, we used to try and come up to snag their pumpkin muffins. Hear me out, I realize that the words “pumpkin” and “muffin” don’t inspire you to drive an hour and a half out of your way but just trust me when I say that it is worth it. Nevertheless, I had the biscuit and my dad and Ben both ordered the homemade brioche bialy Frankenstein creation that was “blasphemously delicious”.
Reindeer Geyser Games
I’ll save you the time and googling – the Old Faithful Geyser in Calistoga, CA is indeed not worth it. This being said, if you have a small child like we do, it is very much worth it to them. So, in the middle of a heat wave and a not quite wound down pandemic we thought taking our unsocialized child to a llama, goat, and geyser attraction would be a safe, outdoor activity. We enthusastically looked up tickets to find out that they were $15 per adult and we might not actually see the geyser so I did what any technologically savvy adult would do. I found a Groupon.
Note: We did not see the geyser blow. Thankfully, we did once see the real Old Faithful in Yellowstone so we felt that seeing the animals was satiating enough an experience.
Dinner at Coqueta
There are so many pros for a dinner at Coqueta, especially right now. There is a vast amount of outdoor dining and you can reserve a table specifying outside or inside. Since we hadn’t dined out for well over a year we were pleased at how safe it was and I made a rule that we should order anything that we could that would not carry out well if we were eating them out of a box. As it was we ordered the sea bass to split, a salad with fresh garbanzo beans I didn’t take a photo of in my state of delirium, and a really over the top charcuterie board. A friendly reminder that we have not been out in a socialized setting in a very long time.
