A Lady in London

After my day of Disneyland fun on Friday, I was ready for some grown-up entertainment. This started at my hotel for the evening, the W Hollywood. A drink at the open-air bar turned into a tequila-tasting session when the guy next to me turned out to be a rep for a high-end tequila brand. This was followed by dinner with my brother and his wife, who kindly came up from San Diego to have dinner with me at a Mexican restaurant nearby. This, of course, involved more tequila in the form of margaritas. By the end of the evening I was pleasantly in grown-up fun mode.

The next day the fun continued up north. The destination was Paso Robles, a town about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The purpose for this part of the trip was the winery wedding of a friend of mine. The added benefits were great wine tasting, olive oil sampling, and seeing friends.

I traveled to Paso Robles on Saturday afternoon, and arrived just in time for the third wedding party wine tasting of the afternoon. Given that they had all been to two previous wineries, I had some catching up to do. It wasn’t a problem. The wines at EOS winery were more than drinkable, and the huge dinner that followed at a nearby restaurant was enough to put me in food coma.

Well, almost enough. First came the western-themed bar, Big Bubba’s. This bar came fully stocked with a mechanical bull. Knowing better than to think I stood a chance of staying on its back, I sipped a glass of local wine while others made attempts to ride the bull with varying degrees of success.

The following day started off with more wine tasting. Adelaida Cellars had a beautiful hilltop tasting room, and the wines were followed by olive oil tasting at a local shop. After a quick stop at the shop’s petting zoo (yep), I took a trip into the college town of San Luis Obispo. There I met up with a childhood friend for lunch before going back to Paso Robles to get ready for the wedding.

A few hours later I found myself at Robert Hall Winery for the nuptials. The bride, who modeled with me at A Lovely Workshop, looked gorgeous, and the backdrop of the vineyard made for a beautiful setting. The ceremony was followed by a cocktail hour outside of the winery, and then a reception in the cellars.

It was a great wedding, and the fact that the photographer and videographer were both people I knew from A Lovely Workshop—the former being Elizabeth Messina herself and the latter being Kristen from Bliss—made it even more special.

The day after the Paso Robles winery wedding I was still plagued with my usual jet lag, and found myself awake at 7am. I started traveling north an hour later. My destination was San Francisco, where another healthy dose of friends, family, and good wine was waiting patiently for my arrival. To be continued…