Leona Valley Winery

As a present for Loren's 21st birthday, I landed a LivingSocial deal for a wine tasting for two, house-cooked pizza, and take-home bottle of wine for $37 at Leona Valley Winery.

It was such a lovely time!  I love wine, as does Loren, but I'm by no means an expert, and have never been wine tasting at all, let alone in the big leagues (Napa, etc.)... but I really do think this is one of the best first experiences we could have had.

Leona Valley is out near Lancaster, and in order to get to it from Long Beach, you have to drive past Los Angeles and then either use highways 5 and 138 or take winding canyon roads.  Luckily, my GPS guided me to the canyon roads - I wish I had pictures to show you all, the drive was absolutely gorgeous.  Living in the L.A. basin, it's easy to forget there is really beautiful geology outside the seemingly endless urban sprawl, without having to actually drive up mountains - California is beautiful.  Rolling green hills, random creeks, craggy rock... unfortunately I was focused on driving and Loren was asleep, so no photos were taken.  If you ever have to get to a remote part of California, definitely take anything that says "_____ Canyon Road."  Thank me later.

A note on GPS - don't use it to find the winery.  My GPS could not locate the exact address, and when I accepted a different street number in order to approximate its location we got completely lost in the middle of flat ranch land north of Lancaster.  We had been searching for the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve and couldn't locate that either using the GPS... definitely trust Google Maps when trying to find these more remote locations.  I finally used the Google directions to point to a place on the GPS map with no streets and told it to take me there, and that fortunately worked.

So, we got to the winery, tried five delicious and very unique wines, ate our free vegetarian pizza, and got to take home a bottle of a $60 blend of their wines they call Meritage.  This winery's wines are all very unique, and the tasting was set up quite well - well paced, well ordered, and they gave us plenty of warning and suggestion of when to order (warned us if we wanted any additional wine, to order it before the port because of the potency of flavor, etc.).  Loren bought a bottle of the Pinot Noir we tried, which had a smokey earthy flavor to it we'd never tasted before, as his first alcoholic purchase, and then we explored the grounds a bit.

Leona Valley Winery is one the few if not the only winery in Leona Valley - it's not wine country like Santa Barbara or Temecula.  It's very rural and ranch-y.  One thing the valley is known for is its numerous cherry orchards, where they have open picking during harvest season.  Right now it's spring, so the orchards aren't open to the public, but the trees are in bloom and very pretty.

So, without further ado, I will give you pretty pictures to wrap this up.

Driving into the winery

Our tasting glasses, with the pizza "kitchen" beyond

Delicious fresh cooked vegetarian pizza

Me, enjoying some delicious port.

Cute decorative touches around the small grounds.

Some of the growing vines.

A view over the valley

Budding grapes.

A barrel of Port.

Waiting barrels.

The tasting "room" - open to view the valley and vines, with heat lamps to keep us warm!

Later that night, I surprised Loren with a get-together in Hollywood with some members of our band, who took us out to dinner.  We went to Miceli's, a historical little restaurant that has been there since 1949.  Inside is very cute, bottles of Chianti hang from the ceiling and a pianist plays continuously while various waitresses sing.  It was a very nice evening - I recommend it to anyone visiting Hollywood and wants pleasant dining, good food, atmosphere, and reasonable prices (not exactly easy to find in Hollywood!)

Loren and Gary, esteemed Elviss wrangler.  Happy birthday Loren!

San Francisco (the somewhat-jaded-but-still-interested-tourist edition)

Sorry for the several-day lag... homework, plus I was waiting to receive one photo from my band director before posting.  This will be the last post for this trip.

So, on Saturday, we went into San Francisco.  We had only a very short time (we were dropped off at 10 and told to be back on the bus at 12:45), and were dropped off at Pier 39 which isn't that fun if you've been there more than once and don't like to shop (look, kids, Alcatraz again. Look, kids, sea lions again).  I suppose we could have checked out the ship&submarine they have nearby, but I was waiting for my friend Laura to pick me up to go out to lunch, so Alex & I just walked around and did exactly those things I started out the entry with.

Then, my friend Laura, who goes to UC Berkeley, picked us up and we went to Mission, an area on Mission Street centered around a couple of actual missions (which we unfortunately didn't have time to see).  We went to lunch at a delicious vegan/vegetarian organic restaurant called Gracias Madre.  It was veryveryvery yummy.  I got a horchata latte and a butternut squash quesadilla with so many ingredients I can't even begin to list them.  The greatest tragedy of the day was leaving my leftovers in Laura's car so I couldn't enjoy it later... I have nothing but rave reviews for this place (service / atmosphere / food ALL FANTASTIC), but I'll save that for a Yelp review.

My friend Alisa, who goes to UC Davis, was also in town, and she and her friend met us for lunch as well.  I haven't seen either her or Laura since December, so it was a really fun lunch just being ridiculous (at one point we almost got Laura to salsa dance in the middle of the restaurant, and the waiter offered her free dessert if she did - unfortunately that hilarity never happened) and catching up.

San Francisco was very traffic-y, and despite Laura's best efforts to get us back to the bus 10 minutes early, we wound up being 15 minutes late.  Thankfully, they didn't leave without us, because the next destination was back down to Cupertino, a 1.5-hour drive away.

We went to West Valley College, where our instructors gave a clinic to a high school about to go on their own tour to the British Isles (lucky kids!).  They played one of my favorite pieces of all time, Irish Tune From County Derry / Shepherd's Hay by Percy Grainger, and they were GOOD - Irish Tune gave me chills and almost made me cry (it usually does, it has a lot of personal meaning for me).  They're an affluent school from an affluent neighborhood, so they are fortunate enough to be able to afford trips like their upcoming Europe tour as well as private instruction for almost every student and it makes sense why they are so good.  My school, LBCC, caters to an incredibly diverse student body in every way, including race-ethnicity, wealth/income, etc., so for many of our students it was eye-opening to see what resources some communities have compared to their own experiences.

After their clinic, the students had to go (my lateness plus bad traffic had made us arrive quite late to the school), but we still got our instruments out and rehearsed a bit in their facility.  We then went to a group, ASB-paid dinner at Chevy's (basically, a cheaper El Torito), before going back up to San Francisco.

We attended a concert at the San Francisco Symphony.  Unfortunately their more famous conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, was not conducting, but his associate is Herbert Blomstedt, who was the conductor for a decade before Thomas took over and has been all over Europe since, so, I suppose it was alright to settle (sarcasm, he is an amazing amazing conductor).  The program was outstanding - Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with Yundi, and Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 (absolutely gorgeous).

photo snuck inside the concert hall with my phone camera... beautiful venue.

photo courtesy of Brian Hamilton's camera.

We also attended the pre-concert lecture, which introduced those who attended to many elements of the Sibelius in terms non-musicians could latch onto but that musicians like us could still find relevant and intriguing.  Classical musician enthusiast that I am, I have never attended a pre-concert lecture before... I'm going to have to start going (many symphonies do them), it really added a lot to the experience.

We got back to hotel really late (after 11), and I was up a ridiculous amount of time doing homework that night as well.  The next day was spent on the bus, and we were home by 3pm.  I reunited with Loren, got In&Out as a reward for my exhausting journey, went over to his house, and got right back to work on homework.

So, that was my last trip with LBCC.  Even though it wasn't a "tour" in the conventional sense (we had no actual public performances), it was still a really neat musically-oriented trip, with cool experiences.  I'm glad I went.

My next "trip," Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in mid-April, is more an "event," so I won't be doing the typical daily posting here (I won't have internet access anyway).  I will however be sure to do a sum-up here when I get home.

For random Southern California adventures in the meantime, follow my other blog, Adventures In The Southland.

Music Music Music

Today was very long, but very non-touristy.  I'm currently taking a short break from homework to write about it - been stuck doing an insane amount of work due to how I scheduled my classes this semester and haven't been sleeping much, hence the ridiculous time stamp on this entry.

We hit the road from SLO at 8:00am.  The drive was beautiful - California really is such a beautiful state, I need to explore it far more thoroughly if I really want to be a proud native.  There were cherry trees in bloom, lakes and rivers, SO much greenery everywhere... again, beautiful.

We arrived at California State University East Bay in Hayward at around 12:00 noon, ate lunch in their student center, and then spend the afternoon in their music department.  First we observed a rehearsal of their New Music class, then we got to rehearse our own ensembles a bit before being clinic'd by their director of bands.  It was a pretty fun experience, it's always good to have a new conductor in front of the group, it makes everyone step up their game a bit and tells us what we really sound like when we're not slumping through the daily motions of class.  We brought most of our wind ensemble, and only about 7 members of our orchestra.  Both groups got about a half-hour clinic.

We then took the bus another couple hours north to Vacaville.  After dinner at BJ's, we went to see an Air Force Band concert, which was amazing!  All the different military branches are notorious for their extremely high-level wind ensembles.  The concert was great, with some different repertoire than I'm used to hearing in a wind ensemble (Offenbach, Gershwin, to name a couple).

We got back very, very late, and I've been doing homework for about four hours now.  I think I'm about to call it quits, I'll have about an hour in the morning to finish up the chunk I set aside for tonight.  Not to worry about taking the time for this post, it probably took all of 10 minutes, as you may be able to tell by the lack of imaginative or even complete sentences.

Hello From SLO!

Well, Day 1 of LBCC's 2011 "tour" is complete.

We left the school campus this morning around 8:00am.  After driving for a few hours, we stopped near Solvang for lunch (unfortunately we didn't go into the town, so that'll be saved for another trip).  We stopped at an unpromising strip mall with Carl's Jr and Taco Bell and such, but my keen eye spotted a little cafe I expected to be a diner but actually turned out to be the cutest little coffee/sandwich shop, and had a lovely breakfast/lunch.

We then continued on our way.  The drive through wine country and then along the coast was absolutely beautiful.  Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Fulbright showed us a video done by the BBC and John Cleese about beauty and how it's been studied through the human face which was really neat - a theme of this trip is going to be "beauty," both related to music and in general, and it fit with the scenery going by the window quite well.

We passed Cuesta College, where my middle school had participated in a jazz festival my 8th grade year.  I didn't remember it one bit.

We then spent the afternoon touring Hearst Castle.  For anyone who doesn't know, W.R. Hearst was a media mogul in the early 1900s, extending his influence throughout newspaper, magazine, and film, outbidding the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at art auctions, inviting distinguished guests from Charlie Chaplain to Winston Churchill to this estate, which he built himself to emulate the beautiful castles along the Mediterranean sea.  It's a beautiful estate, and contains many beautiful works of art, and is located in absolutely gorgeous natural landforms with a fantastic view of the sea.  I highly recommend it if you are passing through the central California coast at any point in your life.

We went back down to San Luis Obispo for the evening, and were let out to explore the weekly Thursday Farmer's Market and find ourselves some dinner.  Alex and I bought a bag of oranges to share for the rest of the trip, since we both love oranges and will be eating them for our breakfasts.  We found a crepe stand in the Farmer's Market, settled down at a Pete's coffee, and had a delicious dinner.

The street performers were my favorite part.  There was so much music lining every cranny of the market! And other interesting things to see as well.

So, now I am at a Day's Inn, staying up far too late to post this blog after making it through a lengthy Sociology chapter.  Tomorrow we travel further up the coast, and you will hear from me at some point that night (probably very late again, like today).