On Saturday morning, Roger & Dar picked up their rental car and we all headed out of town before the downtown became gridlock due to the annual Chinese New Year parade. It may have been interesting to see but even our Chinese hotel clerk, who lives in the downtown, said "I won't be going. Too many people pushing and shoving. I just go home and watch it on TV with a glass of wine." It's a major production with broadcasters covering the event on Fox TV. We caught some of it on TV later that night.

From San Francisco, we headed north about 2 hours to a resort in the small town of Nice, CA . It's located at the edge of the Bartlett Mountains on Clear Lake, the largest freshwater lake in the U.S. The town was named by a former resident after his home town of Nice, France, around 1930. In the summer, I imagine the place is hopping but, at this time of year, it was very peaceful.

We have neighboring 2-bedroom suites at the WorldMark Clear Lake resort. Our suites are huuuuge, with a living room, large balcony, full kitchen, full bathroom, bedroom and laundry on the main floor, and very large master suite with another full bathroom on the second floor. After our tiny accommodations over the past week, we are rattling around in this big place. I keep losing my husband! Lol.

On Monday, we all headed out in Roger & Dar's Toyoto Corolla rental to see some sights in the area. Our first stop was Old Faithful Geyser of California, located in Calistoga, about 1.5 hrs SW of Nice. It is one of only three "faithful" geysers in the world because of its regular eruptions . The other two are in Yellowstone National Park and New Zealand. A couple of miles down the road was The Petrified Forest. Many giant redwood trees were knocked over and petrified in volcanic ash and lava millions of years ago. 

Then, on a whim, we drove about an hour west from where we were to Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. The ancient coast redwoods are the tallest living things on earth. They live to be 500-1,000 years old, and grow to a diameter of 16 feet and 250 feet tall. HUGE!! Some of the really big'uns live to over 2,000 years and tower above 350 feet. It rains 55" a year at this Reserve, which is perfect for the redwoods as they need a wet, mild climate. I love the smell in a redwood forest. We camped at a giant redwoods forest a few years back, and it's one of my favorite travel memories. :) Since the trees are so tall, the sun doesn't make it through to the ground, so it's cool, damp and kinda dark. Eerie. 

On Wed we drove to the town of Ukiah, about half an hour from here . We stopped at Parducci Wine Cellars and did some wine-tasting. They are the oldest winery in the area, with the origins to the Parducci family from Tuscany in the 1930s. It was cool to see their original bond, or permit, allowing them to produce wine during prohibition but only for "medicinal or religious purposes". Kind of like the current status of medical marijuana, as Roger P pointed out. They are a sustainable-practices winery, and it was interesting to see their operation on our complimentary tour. They still use huge old 20,000 gallon redwood tanks, which were pretty cool to see. Very nice staff. Roger P is a wine maker/drinker, so he purchased some "souvenirs" of our visit. ;-)

After tipping back some wine, we headed to the outskirts of Ukiah to the "City of Ten Thousand Buddahs", the largest Buddhist community in the US. We had to check in at the administration office, and follow the rules of the modest Buddhist lifestyle - modest dress, no alcohol or smoking on the grounds, no meat, garlic, onions, leeks, MSG in the cooking . In retrospect, we maybe should have done our wine-tasting tour after the monastery, not before. :-S It was very quiet and peaceful there, so we had to watch our p's and q's! It had been the site of a large state hospital beginning in the 1930’s. Now, about 80 of the 500 acres are developed as part of the monastic community, with twenty-five of the more than seventy large buildings being used for a monastery, university, primary & secondary schools, prayer & meditation centres, residential buildings, and a vegetarian restaurant /canteen. The remaining 400 acres are fields, woods, orchards and vineyards (non-alcoholic bottles of wine for sale at the restaurant). We saw several peacocks strolling about the grounds - apparently they like to feed on the grapes in the vineyards. 

After having our vegetarian lunch, we went to view the main public attraction, The Jewelled Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas, where the monks, nuns and laymen/women attend daily ceremonies. The inside walls on all four sides of the hall are covered with a grid of 10,000 compartments, each containing a statue of a Buddha, which is intended to give the feeling of being in the Thousand Buddhas Cave in Dunhuang, China . The ten thousand Buddha statues were "made by the Venerable Master himself. Foregoing sleep, the Master spent the nights casting each statue from a mold and then etching its features by hand". The floors of the Hall are lined with yellow bowing cushions. The hall used to be an indoor basketball court, explaining its windowless structure. There is a nearly twenty foot high wooden statue of the Thousand-Handed, Thousand-Eyed Guanshiyin (Avalokiteshvara) Bodhisattvain, carved over several years by a master carver from Hong Kong

Friday - our last day together. :( Having visited most of the small towns and touristy places in the area, we packed up our remaining food and drove to Brassfield Estate Winery for a picnic. They have a beautiful estate with vineyards in High Valley and on the ridges of Round Mountain volcano. They have some neat sculptures of deer and St. Francis of Assisi. They've done a good job of saving materials that would otherwise have been destroyed, and using it on the estate building and grounds. They have over 150 eighty-year-old olive trees that they rescued from the Central Valley after plans for a shopping mall marked their destruction. And their roof tiles, bricks, arbors and pavilion were salvaged from destroyed buildings in San Jose. Their fountain was from Clark Gable's oceanfront estate in Malibu. Fancy smancy!

For our last supper, we went to the Blue Wing Saloon Restaurant in the quaint nearby town of Upper Lake. The Blue Wing originally opened in the 1880s and was a popular watering hole until Prohibition in the 1920s. The Tallman Hotel next door hails from the same period and has been fully restored.

That ends our second week. We are off to Palm Springs. Talk to you in a week. :)