New Year Chill

After Christmas we decided to break up our routine and take a drive over to Temecula to do a little wine tasting. We set out early Friday (the 28th) at 9am for the 1 1/2 hour drive over the mountain because we needed to stop at the Supercharger to get some juice (we could have made the round trip, but why not recharge for free). While waiting for the charge we found CA Pizza and had a pizza for lunch – so all ready to hit the wine trail.

Some of the vineyards were a beautiful red color.

It was a cool (56 degrees) but beautiful day. We spent several hours touring 5 wineries tasting some good and not so good wines. Came home with about a case of wine, but 6 of those were my favorite wine – Danza del Sol Riesling – the main reason for the trip to replenish my supply. Stopped at another favorite – Doffo Winery. Being the holidays, there were a lot of people at every stop we made, so we finally said it was just getting too crowded and headed back to Indio.

The weather started to turn colder, so we packed up the boat on Sat. for this trip and hunkered down inside to stay warm. In fact it was so cool Sat. morning, that Jim turned on the fire to warm up (that fireplace puts out more heat than the heater does).

To miss as much holiday traffic as possible, we headed back home on NY Eve morning at 5:30am. It was an uneventful trip until we were almost hit by the vehicle next to us who swerved to miss a tumbleweed blowing across the freeway. This happened north of Tucson by Picacho Peak. Luckily Jim swerved in time for them to miss us. So we made it home in one piece.

Tucson is usually only about 5 degrees cooler than Indio, but it’s been more like 15 degrees cooler. In fact we woke up New Years Day morning with a dusting of snow.

Tucson does get snow every now and then, but we haven’t had any for the past several years. Our high today (2nd) is only 37 degrees and we had snow again this morning. Not anything that really accumulated though. I’m ready for summer!

We wish everyone a happy, prosperous and fun 2019. Happy travels!