Goodbye California!

I'm finally back and much closer to being settled in my new apartment since Mom & Dad came this past weekend to help me get settled. After I get everything hung on the walls after they paint tomorrow I will feel MUCH better!

But before I left I had two great weekends. The first one Haley (my friend from WS) flew up from southern California for the weekend. We hung out, drank wine (shocking!) and did the one thing I wanted to do before I left - go to a certain viewpoint from the bridge. Here are a few pictures I took -

This is Megan, Christina, Haley & I at Pichetti. Christina was one of the really great friends I made out there - she's dating one of my friends from WS who is in grad school at Stanford so they lived about a mile from me - and we all got to experience the earthquake together!

View all the way at the top - it was such a clear day! Apparently October is the clearest month in the Bay Area:

Haley & I about mid-way down the road:

I could look at the bridge all day I think :) This one is my favorite because you can see the city so well in the backgroundAfter we had dinner in Saucilito we found out it was 'lights out San Francisco. They encourage everyone to turn of the lights for 1 hour to save energy - we drove back up the road to see them turn the lights off...it was pretty stupid but a good picture!

The next weekend/week Mom & Dad came and saved me by helping me pack and ship all of my stuff. Actually, they did the majority of the packing and shipping while I was working fun 12-15 hour days to finish my project! We did take a break during the weekend and watched the game with my favorite old men at the Clemson Alumni club and then headed up to Sonoma for some wine tasting. We had an amazing meal Saturday night and were up and out early on Sunday to drink wine. We made it to 5 wineries and were able to do 5 private tastings! We went to Ledson and Saint Francis in Sonoma, and V'Sattui, Peju, and Biale in Napa. Here are some pictures from our weekend:

Here we are at the member tasting balcony at Ledson - it is a gorgeous enormous house that was supposed to be a residence but they decided to open it as the winery instead!

Here we are at Saint Francis - this was the view during our tasting:

We were able to do a food and wine pairing which I had never done, it was a lot of fun!