Picks and Pans – Napa Valley

PICKS: St. Helena Chamber of Commerce

Although their website is, frankly, uninformative, the staff at St. Helena Chamber of Commerce was helpful in the utmost. We got recommendations on wineries and good bike routes to take between the wineries, all delivered in the friendliest of manners.

Crane Park in St. Helena, CA

Located close to […]

Picks and Pans – San Francisco/Bay Area, Part I

PICKS: Sufficient Grounds in Berkeley

A GPS is a useful gadget, but its utility is greatly limited by the fact that the world (and especially infrastructure) is continually changing, while the GPS’s maps are not. Let’s say, for example, the Bay Bridge is closed, but your GPS doesn’t know about this and is assuredly leading […]

Picks and Pans – Chico, CA

PICKS: Bidwell Park

Bidwell Park offers many good reasons to spend your day outdoors — a huge natural swimming pool formed by damming the creek that runs through the park, large shady fields for lounging, picnicing or playing and miles of trail for walking, jogging or biking. We managed to spend two afternoons with fellow […]

Picks and Pans – In and around Portland

Sean and I each spent four years in Portland, with two of those years overlapping, so coming back was kind of like putting on an old, comfortable pair of jeans. I just slipped right in as though it had been a week and not a decade.

Ned Ludd

Our first night in Portland, Margot and […]

Picks and Pans – In and Around Moab, UT

Moab is an outdoors recreation mecca. There are mountain bike trails galore, plenty of hiking, a river for rafting and kayaking, mountains for camping and climbing, a lake for swimming. It’s a remarkable spot. Which explains why the town is overrun with sporty looking tourist types during the summer. Even with the tourists, though, Moab […]