Petrified Forest
We woke up on Sunday morning and did NOT want to check out from this hotel! Well, it was more like an "Inn" but it didn't feel like it. This room was great! I can really recommend Best Western Cordelia Inn. The only downside is that it's located half an hour away from Napa, but it was of course cheaper too.
Our first stop of the day was Taco Bell to have breakfast. Our mood was brought down when we saw a father hit his son. I am sure he would have called it "discipline" but the mother sure looked embarrassed. Me and Nick said "asshole" loud enough for the father to hear us but he just wanted to get out of there. I hate confrontation but I know that if that guy had come up to us and asked what our problem was, Nick would have given that guy what he deserved. Nick suffered enough abuse in his childhood, to let something like that just slide. It just really bothered me that literally no one else in that room did anything to show their disapproval of this guy's behavior.
We decided to take a walk around in downtown Napa since we had not seen enough of it yet. But the store that we wanted to buy a bunch of cool cooking stuff in was closed, again. Bummer! So we kept on walking... thinking we would run into gorgeous little shops and a ton of people. But go figure... downtown Napa is boring! There was literally five people on those streets even those it was the weekend. We couldn't believe it. I guess there was just not enough fun things to do there so it was abandoned.
I got a fun surprise at a toy store seeing this toucan!! I got one just like this when I was around three years old. I even have video of it. My grandmother's sister and her husband gave it to me and we all laughed when it repeated everything that we said. I love it so much that I still have it safely tucked away in a box. One day I want to put new batteries in it so that my own kids can play with it.
Downtown Napa was beautiful but abandoned...
When Nick grew up he had a dog that he loved very much. He didn't get the chance to say good bye before it got put down, because of a misunderstanding. So it's been hard on him to not ever have said good bye to her. His grandma, who has now passed away, arranged for the dog to be buried at a dog cemetery in Napa. But no one knew where. So we just took a shot and went to the first one that popped up on google. We arrived at this beautiful place on a mountain. It had a water fountain that looked like a well and it was lit with blue lights. such a pretty memorial. Unfortunately the lady who worked there told us that Jazzy was not buried there. But we definitely did not regret driving up on that mountain. The view was absolutely breathtaking! And those mansions... wow...
Oh boy is this our dream house or what... ever since I was a little girl watching "The parent trap" with Lindsay Lohan, I have hoped to live on a vineyard in a house this color :P
Oh boy... living in the edge... literally...
It made me ridiculously happy to see a cactus here and there!
Phew! It was quite a long ride from the pet cemetery to the Petrified Forest, which was our next stop. But it was well worth the trip. Driving around in Napa and seeing hundreds and hundreds of vineyards is damn cool. And we really enjoyed walking around in this forest. Our friend Mel gave us this as a wedding gift :) You walk along a 0.5 mile long trail that is full of trees that got covered in volcanic ashes, during an eruption more than 3 million years ago! The history was cool to read since it was actually a Swedish man who discovered it. He'll be forever known as Petrified Charley ;)
It made me so happy that Nick was totally into it too :) We are quite different in many ways. He prefers to walk and not take any pictures. While I stop every other second to snap photos or read signs. But then something magical happens once in a while, where we see each other's point of view. For example, he ended up taking over the camera for a bit and he realized how fun it was xD That gave me the chance to take it all in. I especially loved the Native American history and how they used some of the leaves in this forest to heal wounds.
Petrified tree! There was some shorter stubs on the tracks so you could touch them. They were hard as rock since they were... well petrified. But they were also very smooth and almost looked like glass. I thought it was a big creepy how they were selling plates with fossils stuck in them in the store xD lol. I get that they are animals who are stuck in time, but I wouldn't want to eat on them.
Standing by "The Queen".
I think our favorite part was this cave!
Look at those big pretty roots!
Cute heart bench where people had engraved their initials :)
I totally fell in love with these red trees. They were so incredibly smooth to touch. Not rough at all. Very, very pretty and unique.
Time to start the looong drive home! Even though our last day made us exhausted, we would have preferred to go back to the hotel instead of home. It took us a few weeks to accept that our honeymoon was over because it was perfect. We just wanted it to go on and on. But it did give us much more energy and strength to tackle life again. We needed this vacation so bad. I accidentally fell asleep the last hour in the car and nodded my head back and forth so hard that I thought I was going to get a whiplash injury xD But it was nice to just sit next to my husband and enjoy our last few moments together alone..
