{"id":2938,"date":"2025-04-01T14:09:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T14:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=2938"},"modified":"2025-04-01T14:39:01","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T14:39:01","slug":"getting-around-in-napa-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=2938","title":{"rendered":"Getting Around in Napa Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In our first forays into wine tasting, way back when, finding our way was simple if not easy.  We would fly to San Francisco, rent a car and drive up to the Route 29 exit from I-80.  Then it was a good 45 minutes until we reached the winemaking area of Napa Valley, which was the only part of Wine Country in the United States we\u2019d ever heard of.  We would continue up Route 29 until we saw a sign indicating a winery.  We would go in, have a sip, take a glass and proceed to the next one.  There weren\u2019t that many wineries then, so it was easy to just keep going north until it was time to go to our hotel.<\/p>\n\n\n

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As more wineries opened and as we spread out to other American winemaking areas, we learned that the best plan was to stop at the first winery we encountered, regardless of our interest in that one, and pick up a tourist magazine.\u00a0 There would be (and still are) lots of ads for wine and wineries to visit, plus restaurants and hotels.\u00a0 That was all helpful in its way, but most important was the centerfold that contained a map showing where all the wineries were.\u00a0 At first, we\u2019d pick a few wineries we wanted to visit and would drive from one to the other, without regard to the amount of time we\u2019d be behind the wheel instead of in front of the bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were a few problems with that approach.  Wineries that paid for big advertisements in the magazine were highlighted on the map and smaller ones that couldn\u2019t afford to advertise were omitted.  If we knew of one of those and wanted to taste their wines, we\u2019d have to call and get driving instructions, which we had to write down on whatever scrap of paper we had.  That approach might have worked, but cell phones were new and coverage was spotty in rural areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came MapQuest.  Before our trip, we would use that app to plot out the routes from one winery to another.  This process was a bit difficult, because if we didn\u2019t know where the wineries were, we would have to figure out in which order to plan the drive, which often necessitated repeated searches.  And all these maps and instructions had to be printed out and taken with us.  We well remember thick manilla folders of maps that the navigator had to fumble through once we arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When GPS applications such as Google Maps replaced MapQuest as our go-to app, it solved a lot of problems, but it created a few others.  Sometimes it simply got the instructions wrong.  We well remember driving miles too far because Google sent us way off the route.  Also, in some cases we remember from a trip to France, if there was a route that was two meters shorter than another, the GPS systems would take us along tiny paths, through farms and vineyards rather than on the main road that would have gotten us where we were going far faster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isn\u2019t technology wonderful?  We still think it\u2019s fun to just wander a bit and find whatever we happen to find.  Still, getting the tourist magazine still helps. This way we can figure out the location of all<\/em> the wineries at one glance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our first forays into wine tasting, way back when, finding our way was simple if not easy.  We would fly to San Francisco, rent a car and drive up to the Route 29 exit from I-80.  Then it was a good 45 minutes until we reached the winemaking area of Napa Valley, which was … Continue reading Getting Around in Napa Valley<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2938"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2938"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2954,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2938\/revisions\/2954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}