Dawn on Mount Shasta

Neither one of us was too excited about the final 6 hour drive home from Ashland, but another excellent latte at Noble Coffee, the spectacular sunrise and the dawn light on Mt Shasta got us off to an good start.

Once we passed through Redding, we were tback to the brown golden hills, fields full of baled hay and numerous grain elevators of the valley. It would appear that the cattle, almost all Black Angus, were all grazing in places with names like Weed, Yreka, and McCloud near the Oregon border, while the farmers grew their feed in the more fertile fields to the south.

After the rather generic towns of Vacaville and Fairfield, we turned off on Highway 12, back in grape land and yet another change of scenery. The rolling hills of Napa with their perfectly tended vineyards and ostentatiously incongruous tasting rooms looking like Italian villas, gave way to rows of old vines, leaves turning to red and gold as we made our final run through Sonoma County. Most of the grapes have been harvested, but we passed one vineyard with clusters of purple grapes still hanging from vines already losing their leaves. It doesn't seem cold enough for the eisweins, sweet liqueurs made from grapes which are left to freeze on the vine. Rather, the sun was warm and shows no sign of taking a winter vacation.

California is a wonderfully varied state, and even the boring bits in the middle can be noteworthy when I look at them through the lens of my camera.