California Here We Come...

… right back where we started from... sometimes I feel like the luckiest person on the planet. I’m sitting in our room at Michaela and Greg’s in Napa Valley – the sun is coming up and I have a corner view of green vine rows stretching to the horizon, birds chirping, olive trees shading the window. Yes – this is where we started from –and where my heart is, whever it is we may live.

Have had a whirlwind first week back in California – two days with ML, Peter and their two long-haired dachsunds, Sunny and Shadow (AKA “the girls”)… lots of tennis, laughter and catching up. Then a stay with Melanie and Andy in their charming home in the Berkeley hills, meeting their friendly and erudite neighbors and making a girls day trip to Filoli, a garden estate in Woodside that’s in the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The estate was once owned by the Cunard family, of the Cunard and Matson shipping lines, and there was an interesting family connection for me… my grandparents traveled to Hawaii on the Cunard liner Lurline in the 50’s. Each night on the ship passengers were presented with the evening’s menu, printed on heavy paper, the covers illustrated with fantastic Gaugin-like paintings of Hawaiian native life. My grandmother brought these home to me, and I used to spend hours in my room, studying the illustrations and fantasizing about a life spent visiting exotic places...one of the sources of my lifelong wanderlust.

The connection? When Mel and I were touring the house – there were the menus – framed and lining the walls of the kitchen… just as colorful and exotic and fascinating as those childhood memories.

While the girls were admiring the flowers and the Hawaiian menus, Dick and his friend Peter Mock did a locals tour of Chinatown, enjoying a lunch that included many dried and delicious delicacies...