The day starts off in Yosemite valley where only Chris is awake before 6am. No one moves when the alarms goes off and so Chris takes the liberty of taking the down the tent while the rest of us were sleeping in it. But boy did that work. It was freezing and lights were seeping through the mesh walls of the tent. It wasn’t quite like a cold shower feeling, but close to it. After fumbling around, cleaning up our stuff from the bear safe lockers, we are all packed up and ready to go by 7am.

After about driving 80 miles we enter Napa Valley, the wine country of California. Pretty much all of us didn’t have much of a clue about wines, so we thought we would visit the Vistor center and find out more. Kev managed to get a map with some of the cheapest wine tasting we could get.

The first on the list was the Napa Valley Winery where we managed to get a wine tasting for $10 for all 5 of us. We never knew what to expect from a wine tasting since we were more beer conissieurs than wine ones. We gingerly walked in to this oval type bar where a barmaid greeted us. We was honest and told her we had no clue and wanted some cheap wine tasting. Thankfully, she was understanding and very helpful. We learnt to swish the glass of wine to release some flavours and attempted to pick out individual flavours just like the experts. We managed to try about 6 wines and at the end we were persuaded to buy a bottle of Folie A Duex White wine Zinfandel.

After the Napa Valley winery we had time to go to one more. We headed to one called Sutter Winery which looked pretty upmarket from the outside. Infact, we felt quite underdressed for occasion. We all were in shorts, T-shirts and flip flips and also a bit merry from the wine tasting before. This was proven when we entered into the winery to be greeted by a middle aged Californian woman who thought we we collge kids who just graduated. She even thought we was from Santa Cruz! The woman fired question after question like the spanish inquistion but finally stopped and let a nice chap called “Ralph” who guided us through the wine tasting. We sipped through about six different wines which I thought were very tasty (and I’m not a wine person). It was so tasty we bought four bottles for the group and Kev bought 2 for himself. I must also add it was only about 4 US dollars a bottle!

I had to be a little careful about tasting these wines as I was driving. I couldn’t help myself to just gulp down the wine but I had to spit out the last few and just appreciate the taste as I could feel the alcohol reach my head. But the others didn’t think twice to spit it out!

After the wine tasting, we safely got some to eat and found a hotel of which all 5 of us bundled into a room. The night was still young and there was no bars nearby. But there was a cinema which was showing Tropic Thunder of which we went to see to finish off for the day.

So this was the last day of our road trip. The next day we will have to drive San Francisco to hand the keys back for the minivan we have lived in for the past 3 weeks. It definitely has been fun and got to see many parts of the USA that couldn’t be reach by public transport alone. We say goodbye to the van who we affectionately named “Sheila” and hope the guys who get her next will have a blast as we did. Adios!