Under the Baobab Tree

St. Helena and Yountville

Things here in Napa are improving. Yesterday I took off from the Horror Resort in my rental car with the only objective being to get as far away as possible from this hell hole. I went north, found a Starbucks in downtown Napa with a lousy Internet connection and warm coffee in which I sat "working" and watching the torrential rain. We have record-breaking low temperatures here in Napa which means all my Orlando conference resort attire is utterly useless to me. I realized freezing to death in the Starbucks that I needed to amend my objective to include buying warmer clothes.

So I kept heading north and found myself in a marvelous little town called St. Helena. It has a main street with fabulous little shops and yummy wonderful restaurants and no deformed tourists at all. I sat at the bar of a restaurant and ate a yummy risotto cake and cucumber soup and read a magazine for a long while. I drank fabulous coffee from the Napa Valley Coffee Roasting company. I watched vineyard owners come in and gab with the proprietor. They were from famous places like Cakebread and Duckhorn. I watched the torrential rain.

When the rain eased I walked down the quaint street and found a store that sells nothing but Life is Good attire. Two floors of Life Is Good. I stocked up on extra pairs of socks, a warm fluffy scarf, a fleece number, etc. Warm clothes, warm coffee, no weird Horror Resort smells, and good food. I was starting to feel better.

Then I kept going down the street and found a store with millions of bazilliions of beautiful costume jewelry items from around the world. I bought a ton of that too, thinking I would dress up my new socks with baubles and stun the town. We'll see if that works.

Then I kept going and was sucked into an art gallery with a lovely woman and beautiful art. I walked out half an hour later having purchased a beautiful oil painting of poppies and grasses painted from the vantage point of someone lying in the grass. It will arrive in DC in three weeks, after the "crate man" comes back from vacation. That will give me time to find a place in my thimble-sized condo to hang it. I love art. LOVE ART. Love it. The art gallery woman was impressed that I was from DC, "You have to be pretty smart to live there, don't you?" I suppose, I said, why? "You have to know all about politics and stuff. I don't understand any of that. We just do yoga and drink wine here in St. Helena." I said I thought that sounded much better than life inside the Beltway. We became fast friends. And she told me the word the locals use to describe deformed tourists. "A lot of people come through the gallery, but most of them are unqualified," she said. "Unqualified?" "Yes, they are not really going to buy any art. You could hit them over the head with a fabulous painting and they would say, 'but I don't like brown' or something." Ah, I said. I'm staying in a lousy hotel full of "unqualifieds" I told her. She nodded sagely. I will have to work that word into my daily vocabulary.

Then my friend Lisa showed up from San Diego and we set about getting down to conference business. Which involved renting an SUV with a driver named Ryan who took us to Yountville with 10 of our conference friends to a truly wonderful restaurant called Bottega. It was not my dinner, I was just a guest, but our 10 friends were rather unruly and so I ended up sitting at the head of an enormous wooden trestle table trying to bring order to the meal. It was challenging. I was up there like the Duchess of York, banging my fork on one of the ever multiplying wine glasses and demanding that people focus on the menu or, barring that, at least let me order for them. The waitress took heed. Several times someone tried to order something gawdawful and the waitress looked at me and said, "do you really want me to bring that for them" and I would say, "no, whenever anyone tries to order the octopus, just bring us those wonderful savory pastries with prosciutto and cherries instead." It worked out rather well and the other guests were so unruly they didn't even notice that what they ate was not precisely what they had ordered. I found this all so draining though that when it came time for me to order my dinner I looked wanly at the waitress and said, "Just bring me the best thing, whatever that might be." With pleasure! She said. Then I told her that despite my Duchess of York role, I was not in charge and that she should present the bill to Lisa, who was occupied with the unrulies. She did and Lisa signed without really even looking at what she was signing. I thought, "hmm, is there a career opportunity here?"

Attached is a pic of me and Lisa at the enormous trestle table in Yountville....before things got truly out of hand.

Lisa and I in addition to being colleagues are good friends mainly because we spend our money on the same things -- clothes, horses and art. I only ever see her at conferences -- San Diego, Barcelona, Orlando, here, etc. It's the secret to the success of our law firm -- now we are just lobbying for even more ceremonial roles in the firm. We were thinking we could be, you know, "Firm Emissaries" or something. Give us a location, with good food, clothes, and art, and we will go there and "emiss" or whatever it is emissaries do.

What's wrong with that?


P.S. My favorite new wine is the Goldeneye Pinot Noir. Closely followed by the Duckhorn, which happens to have been the red wine of choice at Orlando last weekend as well. GO FIRM!