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Sonoma County: Not A Second Best
Napa Valley may be better known as California's wine country, but Sonoma County, just to the west of Napa, is bigger and better in myriad ways: Whereas Napa is based on a monoculture — virtually all its land is cultivated only in wine grapevines — Sonoma still has agricultural breadth, including orchards, ranches and nurseries laced among wineries so foodies find a bigger slice of heaven.
Pick up a free Sonoma County Farm Trails map and boost your winery touring with tastings at farms growing cherries, apples, berries and tomatoes along with some of the best cheeses produced anywhere. Cultivators of orchids, roses, azaleas and other flora are also open for touring.
The most fascinating farm we toured was California Carnivores, located in a greenhouse on the Mark West Vineyards in Forestville. This is the only nursery in the world that cultivates carnivorous plants — insect eaters like the Venus Fly Trap. The 400 varieties of these amazing flora grown here are widely prized not for the fact that they eat insects but because they are so beautiful.
Wineries are no second string in Sonoma, either. Sonoma County wines have received more awards than any other California wine-growing region for the last eight years in a row. More than 140 wineries there include the oldest such operation in the state, the lovely Buena Vista Winery, a favorite site for weddings. Other big-name Sonoma county wineries open for touring include Korbel, Piper Sonoma, Rodney Strong, Bandiera, Clos du Bois, Kendall-Jackson, Kenwood and Chateau St. Jean. Personal favorites include Matanzas Creek Winery, Benziger Family Winery and Iron Horse Vineyards.
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History buffs also are happier in Sonoma County, where Old California is best preserved. Right downtown in the city of Sonoma is a mother lode of state history, including the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, the last of California's 21 missions, as well as the surprisingly Euro-Victorian home, built in 1851, of General M.G. Vallejo, the last leader of the region when it was still a Mexican pueblo.
Downtown Petaluma is considered one of California's best preserved downtowns, where films including "Giant," "American Graffiti," "A Walk in the Clouds," "Phenomenon" and "Inventing the Abbotts" all have been shot. Thirty-eight buildings here survived the 1906 earthquake, including Ironfront Row, where each building's facade is a marvel of cast-iron columns and details.
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Tasting tables at Kozlowski Farms, one of the farms
open for touring in Sonoma County.
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The Petaluma Adobe State Historic Park showcases California's largest non-mission adobe, built in the 1840s and restored to display rancho life of the time.
Also beckoning are the picturesque tiny towns of Glen Ellen, Guerneville, Sebastopol and Occidental.
Nature lovers also will be happier in Sonoma County. Horseback ride on the beach at Bodega Bay, canoe down the Russian River or stroll through the 1,400-year-old redwoods in the Armstrong Redwoods State Preserve.
Many fabulous hotels, B&Bs and inns are scattered throughout this large region, as well as dozens of great restaurants befitting such a fertile land. Among our favorite accommodations are Madrona Manor in Healdsburg, an 1881 showplace; the Kenwood Inn & Spa in Kenwood, an elegant European-style inn; the Inn at Occidental, a wonderful, Victorian, eight-room B&B owned and operated by a former administrator of a law firm in San Diego (Jennings, Engstrand); and Sonoma Coast Villa in Bodega, a Mediterranean country inn that was once a private home.
For more information, contact the Sonoma County Convention & Visitors Bureau at (800) 326-7666.
The City That Care Forgot
It’s also known as The Big Easy and the Queen of the South. It is like no other city in the U.S. It’s not really American, not really Caribbean, not really European, although all those influences seem to converge here.
Its collision of cultures over centuries has co-mingled Creole, Cajun, European, Southern and Yankee into a place where jazz was born, where voodoo still exists, where gays are out, where tourists flock to party, where tolerance of all characters abounds.
It is, of course, New Orleans, the most bohemian city in the country. A place where dining is an art form, where music spills out onto the sidewalks of the legendary French Quarter, where artists and writers have been irresistibly drawn for hundreds of years.
Consider the illustrious list of writers who were born here: Truman Capote, Pulitzer-winner Shirley Ann Grau, Pulitzer-winner John Kennedy Toole (whose 1980 "A Confederacy of Dunces" is considered one of the best and funniest books to capture New Orleans itself), Lillian Hellman, Frances Parkinson Keyes (whose "Dinner at Antoine's" memorializes the city's oldest restaurant), Anne Rice and others.
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Writers who found many a muse here include Tennessee Williams (whose "Streetcar Named Desire" is another Big Easy icon), William Faulkner, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Sherwood Anderson, Walker Percy, Katherine Anne Porter — who married Robert Penn Warren at the State Supreme Courthouse in the Quarter — Eudora Welty, Walt Whitman and Richard Ford, who still lives in New Orleans and who won both the Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner Award (an unprecedented achievement) in 1995 for "Independence Day."
"It is the most congenial city in America that I know of, and it is due in large part, I believe, to the fact that here at last on this bleak continent the sensual pleasures assume the importance which they deserve," said Henry Miller about New Orleans in "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare," 1945.
Food, glorious food, is an all-day New Orleans pleasure. The country's favorite restaurant in virtually every poll, Commander's Palace, is here in the graceful Garden District; don’t miss its turtle soup and crab cakes.
Go for the shrimp and crabmeat cheesecake appetizer at Broussard's, a classic 1920 Creole restaurant that hides one of the French Quarter's characteristic and loveliest courtyards.
Expect lines out the door for lunch on Fridays at Galatoire's, a New Orleans tradition since 1905 (where Blanche takes Stella to dinner in "Streetcar"). The mirrored room remains as unchanged as the ethereal souffléed potato puffs.
And experience another local tradition, Café Brulot, which at Arnaud's, another Creole favorite since 1918 where you can also view upstairs a historic collection of elaborate Mardi Gras gowns, is flamed truly theatrically with Grand Marnier and brandy.
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Galatoire's restaurant, one of the venerable,
legendary gathering spots in the French
Quarter, where Blanche took Stella to
dinner in Tennessee Williams'
"A Streetcar Named Desire."
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Breakfast at Brennan's is a late-morning mecca, especially for Bananas Foster, which was created here.
And wake up, if you can, in the 150-year-old Hotel Maison de Ville in the French Quarter, where Tennessee Williams himself once lived in Room No. 9, or in its sister Audubon Cottages, where John James Audubon painted some of his "Birds of America" in 1921. Or in the Fairmont Hotel, just a block outside the French Quarter, where the Art Deco Sazerac Bar is a stunning step back in time.
For more choices, contact the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, (504) 566-5011, or visit its Web site, www.nawlins.com.
Adventure Capital Of The World
It has been called a "paradise for adrenalin junkies." Commercial bungee jumping, white-water river rafting and river jet boating all were pioneered here. Add to that list such pursuits as hang-gliding, parachuting, heli-skiing and mountain biking and you must be in Queenstown, New Zealand, the "Aspen of the South."
In the heart of the "Southern Alps" on New Zealand's South Island, Queenstown thrills also for its truly spectacular scenery.
Queenstown itself, a town of just 16,000 and more than 100 restaurants, is sandwiched between mountains aptly named the Remarkables and Coronet, Cecil and Walter Peaks. At the foot of town lies the pristine Lake Wakatipu, 50 miles long and 900 feet deep; its water is so pure, you can drink it straight out of the lake. During a tour with fellow travel writers one afternoon, we found Moonlight Stables on the 800-acre Doonholme Farm, where we hoisted ourselves onto well-groomed quarter horses to gallop through the hills above Lake Hayes and the banks of the Kawarau River.
We joined Outback New Zealand for a four-wheel-drive safari into Skipper's Canyon, a feat in itself as the narrow dirt road hugs the sides of towering rocky cliffs carved out more than 100 years ago to work the mines that brought gold diggers here.
Skipper's Canyon also is the site of two major bungee jumps from old bridges over the Kawarau River. The originator of the sport, A.J. Hackett, runs one bungee site where jumpers fall 229 feet on giant rubber bands, while a competitor, Pipeline Bungy, takes jumpers farther into the canyon to dive 340 feet, the highest bungee plunge in New Zealand.
While we didn’t succumb to bungee fever, virtually everyone in Queenstown had jumped or was planning to. "Why not?" they all said. Those over 60 jump free. And one young man we talked to at the Pipeline was going back for his seventh jump that day. "It’s just a rush," he said in utter understatement.
We did experience the Shotover Jet, progenitor of jet boating invented here in 1970, and can attest to 30 minutes of pure exhilaration on the Shotover River. Our driver whipped us through a narrow canyon at speeds in excess of 50 mph on a river only inches deep in places. He'd veer straight into the rocky cliffs, only to avert disaster by literally inches. All the passengers in our 12-person boat, from 6-year-olds to 60-year-olds, were giggling and whooping and marveling at this thrill ride, remarkably unafraid, feeling total confidence that our driver had to know what he was doing because what he was doing couldn’t be done otherwise.
And then we saw Milford Sound, once described by Rudyard Kipling as "the eighth wonder of the world." Flying in a small plane for just 35 minutes from Queenstown, we landed at the sound to board the Milford Wanderer for a two and one-half hour cruise on this body of water that’s really a fiord.
The northernmost fiord in New Zealand's Fiordland National Park, Milford Sound is strikingly dramatic, awesomely vertical and the second wettest place on Earth (Kauai is wettest). The glacially formed fiord is tinged a teal blue around its edge, where waterfalls cascade hundreds of feet from above, and where dolphins, seals, killer whales and sharks thrive in water that’s so cold, a human would die in it in 10 minutes.
We played golf at the exceptional Millbrook Resort, whose 18 holes were designed by New Zealand's greatest golfer, Bob Charles. We shopped in Arrowtown, an Old West-style historic town that was the first settlement in this area during its gold rush of the 1860s. And we even toured the caves of Gibbotson Valley Winery where some of the South Island's best chardonnays are produced.
But perhaps the best of thrills of all in Queenstown were its people, the naturally laid-back Kiwis, whose constant refrain, "No worries," speaks volumes about a visit here.
To find out more, contact Destination Queenstown, Box 353, Queenstown, New Zealand, phone (011) 64-3-442-7440, or visit its Web site: http://nz.com/webnz/Queenstown.
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