#12 - Palo Alto duck pond

Ruth was a bit scared of the ducks and geese to start with, but she was soon waving and saying "birdie".  The duck pond is part of the Palo Alto Baylands nature reserve with an "interpretive center" (Alex refused to go to this).  It is close to our house, and very close to the airport where Pippa flies from, so we could see little planes coming in and out.  The weather was beautiful.  Pippa is planning to plant a geocache there.

#11 - Cooking with gas

We achieved another major milestone in the American Lifestyle Experience yesterday with the purchase of a large gas barbeque. Obviously we have a long and colourful history of barbequeing, with the Emsworth influence, but we have never cooked with gas before. However, we thought that this would be the way ahead out here so we can have bbqs after work easily. We visited "Barbeques Galore" in Palo Alto, where the salesman soon spotted an easy upsell opportunity and talked us into a larger model than we had planned. It took us* two hours to put the beast together, but finally we were able to christen it last night with a pair of big steaks. We think February 6th is a new record for the first Smith barbeque of the year**.



* i.e. Pippa
** although we did cheat by moving to a warmer continent.

The blog of new things

Hello all

Sorry we have been a bit rubbish at updating this blog. I was struggling to work out what were interesting things to write about. I've now decided to structure it around new experiences and adventures we are having out here. So here are the latest few:

New Experience #10 (we must be up to about that): Trip to Sonoma

Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/gawley/1RichardSVisit?authkey=Gv1sRgCNb7gYTb75GQ9wE#


We visited the Sonoma wine region with our friend Richard. Although the weather was not great we found this quite conducive to indoor wine-tasting. We enjoyed Sauvignons at the Dry Creek Vinyard, and Pinots at J Winery (really good).



















And just enjoyed the nouveau-riche italian-themed villa and grounds at Ferrari-Carano. The pig statue was quite special.

We stayed in lovely Healdsburg, in the Inn on the Plaza which was a small period-style ("quaint") B&B. They had a great feature of a spacial "carpe diem" rate if you book on the day which worked out well for us. We really liked Healdsburg - Ruth went to sleep in her stroller two nights in a row as we sampled their excellent restaurants. We especially recommend Zin.