Here is the second installment of Wine Country Revisited. If you missed the first one you can catch up here.

Thursday, June 29, 2006 - Noonish thru 2am

So after leaving the Buena Vista and the Dirty Martini bar we take a ride down Lombard Street. It’s one of those things that I had seen on TV and to drive it is something else. There was a line of people waiting to drive down it and most weren’t too friendly about keeping their place in line as people were cutting and didn’t really care what what anybody else thought about it. The guys in this black truck did cut in front of us. I tried snapping a couple of shots on the way down and this is the best one.

Jerri then gave us a tour of some pretty cool places around San Francisco including the Presidio, the Cliff House and Ocean Beach before heading to our one-night stay at the Archbishop’s Mansion. The place was pretty cool. It has themed rooms though I can’t recall which room we stayed in or which room Jerri stayed in (but Jerri can probably recall if she’ll comment). The place offered some wine and cheese around Happy Hour time and we enjoyed some in the Parlor where there was a chandelier that was used in the movie Gone With the Wind. Robin is a huge fan of the movie and was purely delighted to be drinking wine beneath it!

Wait, isn’t this supposed to be about Wine Country?? It is…I know…hang in there with me. It will be worth it I promise!

We drank some wine and had a bite or 2 of cheese and catch a cab to Kuleto’s in the Financial District for dinner and drinks. We started out at the front bar drinking some good Syrah and eating marinated olives, pickled garlic and other finger foods when 3 guys to our left strike up a conversation. We talk about Texas and Colorado and SF while one of the guys makes eyes at Jerri. They seem to travel a lot and are in town for a medical convention. Eventually, our table is ready and we stuff ourselves with a great dinner and a couple more bottles of wine. Now we are primed and I mean PRIMED for a night out!

Around 10pm we catch another cab over to Bix where it’s standing room only and we somehow make our way to the bar and I continue drinking Syrah while Robin switches to, you guessed it, dirty martinis and Jerri switches to Cosmopolitans. Somewhere along the line I lost count of the number of drinks we all had but we had a great time debating what the butler in the huge painting to the left of the bar was thinking.

As we’re about to wrap up the evening we are accosted by the same 3 guys we met earlier at Kuleto’s. It turns out that they are salesman for surgical instruments used in female-only procedures; hysterectomies and such, yeah, THAT was a comfortable conversation! The one is still trying to pickup Jerri and she’s having none of it. After being rebuffed multiple times he finally reveals that he’s married and the gang catches the cab before us. Jerri later claims to have known from the minute we first met these guys that she knew he was married even though he wasn’t wearing a ring. This still baffles me but you just can’t question a woman’s intuition!

The point of the evening is that nobody can remember specifics. We remember the salesmen, the paintings and the drinks (nameless syrah) but we’re all a bit foggy on the details.

Before the night is over, well…let’s just say that only 2 of us remember the cab ride home! I won’t say which one of us it was who couldn’t remember but I will say that I vividly remember the Asian cabbie getting all 4 wheels off the ground on the way back to the hotel on one of those steep downhill roads. Kinda like in the opening sequence in the Streets of San Francisco with Michael Douglas. It was crazy!

I think we woke everybody in the hotel up as we ssshhhed each other and the ladies giggled all the way to our rooms.

Well, it was a long day and it was still only Thursday and we still haven’t gotten to Wine Country. Rest assured that we make the trek to Petaluma where some interesting things happen at a Motel 6, a visit to Bodega Bay and a crazy limo ride with George through Napa Valley.

Tune in next time!