Day Twenty-Six and Twenty-Seven

Got up on Sunday and fixed bacon and eggs over the camp stove. There's something about eating bacon and eggs outdoors that makes them irresistible. Along with camp stove coffee, the morning couldn't have started off any better. It was quiet and a little on the cool side. We both took our showers after breakfast and headed into Murphys to do some wine tasting. Since the town of Murphys boasts about a dozen or more tasting rooms (there are fourteen wineries within two miles of the town), there was no shortage of activities. On the way, we stopped at an art exhibit and the supermarket in Avery. Once there, we decided to grab some more supplies and go back to camp to read and relax. We never made it to Murphys but we did manage to do some wine tasting at camp! Once we returned, a nice rainstorm hit and so Bob and I headed to the car to sit and drink wine and eat the remaining smoked salmon and cream cheese I had mixed up the day before and finished off some crackers and, of course, a whole bottle of wine. We sat in the car and rolled the windows up and down depending on how hard the rain came down. The smell of the wet forest was heavenly and almost heady. The Stevenot Sauvignon Blanc probably helped too. The rain continued for about an hour and then abruptly stopped. Dinner that night consisted of turkey sausage cooked over the camp fire and once browned, summer squash from the garden, along with chopped scallions, were added with a couple of tablespoons of pesto. I had two large portobello mushrooms that I cleaned out and filled with butter and a little of the pesto and then placed those on the grill to cook. All this over pasta and it was time to eat once again.

Sunday we headed out early and ended up taking Sheep Ranch Road out of Arnold heading toward Jackson. We wanted to go to our favorite winery, Cantiga in Somerset, to pick up our wine club selection for this quarter. Sheep Ranch Road turned out to be a great drive and we ended up in Mokelumme Hill which is just four miles south of Jackson. As we headed toward Somerset, we stopped at Mt. Aukum Winery and ended up buying another case of 2006 Syrah which we fell in love with when we did the Fairplay Wine Festival in June. After hitting Cantiga, we headed home looking forward to sleeping in our own bed once again.