Occidental, I think that I just fell in love with you

After spending several days doing some climbs around Napa, we finally checked out of our motel in downtown Napa, loaded up our panniers, and headed west, aiming for the tiny community of Occidental. We only discovered after returning to Boston that Tom Waits now calls Occidental home.

Ice Whine in Napa

So just a few days after I post a picture of a 100 ml tube of sunscreen that was being rapidly used up in New England, I head off to the airport to fly to California where TSA threatened to take it away from me! In some wicked twist of fate, John had some vacation time to use up before April 1st, and we decided to head off the Northern California to do some early season hill climbing in nice weather. We booked our trip long before realizing that the world had flipped and Boston was now in the tropics. In the week before our departure, we starting crying over the forecasts, as Boston was to be 80F and sunny while Napa and Sonoma were to be 50s and rainy, as it should be in Boston at this time of year. We packed up warm clothes, but optimistically threw the sunscreen in anyway.