Wow. We had such a nice time tasting wines in Napa Valley, mostly in the St Helena and Yountville areas. Eric already mentioned the who, so now that I’m back in NC and can edit the photos… here are some shots of the beautiful winery estates we visited…

my dad, me and my stepmom under the trellis at Domaine Chandon

the setting at Jarvis was more lovely than the wine, unfortunately

hey! the Silver Oak lighthouse isn’t really in the vineyard like the label illustrates

who knew they had fantastic wines at Beringer, it’s not just white zinfindel!

Silverado has a lovely building and view of their vineyards off the patio

For the record, the setting at Rombauer was beautiful with plenty of potted plants and gardens, we just didn’t take any photos there.

Today we had a four-hour lunch – yes, 4 hours! – at the famous French Laundry in Napa Valley, then made our way back to San Francisco.

We arrived in San Francisco late last night, and made our way to St. Helena this morning. Today we tasted wines at Rombauer, lunch at Domaine Chandon, Jarvis, Silver Oak, and finally Beringer. Tomorrow includes lunch at French Laundry and tasting at Joseph Phelps. It’s a rough life, we know :)

We’ve been a bit lax with updates, in part because we post many of our quickie updates on Facebook, but so far we’ve had a great month. Some of the highlights:

• Had one of my UNC papers accepted to PLOS Genetics, a well-regarded journal
• UNC won the NCAA men’s basketball tournament – Go Heels!
• Tax refund from the state, and nothing owed to the Fed.
• Parents visited for Easter – great dinners at The Mint and 18 Seaboard in Raleigh, and a nice paella at home for Easter dinner.
• U2 tickets for next October in Raleigh
• One hour later we jumped on a great deal to Lima, Peru, over the Labor Day weekend for less then it would cost to fly to Chicago!

My current passport expires in October of this year, so on Monday I sent a variety of supporting documents and my old passport off for renewal. Of course, this means an awesome deal to Iceland will now appear in two weeks and we won’t be able to go.

This passport still bears my maiden name and even though it was ‘amended’ on the back page, I have been subject to manual check-ins and some strange looks for the last 7 years. Not too surprisingly, many gate agents don’t know to check the back page for name changes. Not that I’ve ever been denied boarding, but it will be so nice to just hand everything over and have it match!

Of course, this name situation made filling out the renewal form a little tricky as I’m not exactly sure what the passport office considers my ‘name most recently listed on the passport’ to be. Is it the name the passport was originally issued in or the name it was changed to in 2002? I sat on hold for almost 30 minutes with the official passport office, so, in the end I just filled everything out the best I could and sent along a copy of my marriage license in case anyone wants to be lazy. (Of course, the email I sent was answered after I mailed everything off and it turns out I didn’t need to send in my marriage license after all and was typically overthinking the entire ordeal.)

Because I like all the stamps I received over the last several years, I scanned in the pages of my old one in case they don’t return it.

Eric seems to think that they won’t return it, but my first one (1994-1999) was returned with a double hole punch in the cover and a canceled stamp on the front page, so we’ll see.

Regardless, this passport book has taken me to South Africa (twice!), Mexico, England, Canada (twice!), Curaçao, Switzerland, France, Spain, Ireland, St Martin and Germany and I can’t wait to find out where the new one will take me over the next ten years!

Once a meaningful and historic spot, the East Side Gallery murals have become overrun with graffiti in the last few years. It’s very difficult in many cases to determine what the original artwork was beneath all the tagging and signatures.

Even the sign asking visitors to “please respect this historic work of art” had graffiti on it. Supposedly this area was restored just five years ago, but some of the more famous sections were barely recognizable. Eric did manage to get a few photos of the less disturbed work, but ultimately we left disappointed and saddened.

It’s really too bad that people feel the need to leave their mark here in such a destructive way.

Once we left the Berliner Dom, the weather got progressively worse until we found ourselves at dinner soaking wet from running through the streets of Berlin in a downpour for 15 minutes to get back to the parking garage and the car.

Before the rain, we made it into the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church just before a concert and snapped a few photos of the magnificent blue glass cathedral.

Amazingly, some of the highly detailed frescoes have been beautifully preserved in the original church after the WWII bombings.

We weren’t quite ready for dinner, so we stopped at Ka De We (Department Store of the West) to see what Berlin’s version of Harrod’s looked like. I would have a lovely photo of the exotic fruit display but a certain grouchy saleslady chastised me for taking photos in the store. Next time I’ll have to be more stealthy. I did, however, get a pic of the Veuve Clicquot bar and we bought three specialty chocolate bars, so all was well.

For dinner, we headed back to the Sony Center which was now lit up in blues and purples for the evening and offered us some respite from the damp.

Our friends dropped us off at the hotel around 10pm and before retiring we ventured out one last time so Eric could get a shot of the picturesque Brandenburg Gate at night.

During our 2o hours in Berlin, we managed to pack in quite a lot of sightseeing. It helped that we only spent about 4 hours of that sleeping. :)

The Brandenburg Gate is magnificent in person. You used to be able to drive through the slots, but the ground underneath was becoming unstable, so now traffic is rerouted around the gate. Amusingly, there were men dressed up like German officials providing ‘passports’ stamped with East and West insignias. Oh, and break dancers too.

One block north is The Reichstag, home of the German Parliament. Uli took this lovely photo of us so we have actual proof that we set foot in Germany. We will definitely visit the rooftop on a future visit as you have a bird’s eye view into the building from above through the dome.

Unexpectedly, one of my favorite experiences was the Holocaust Memorial. From the sky, it doesn’t look like much but on the ground, it’s like a sea of unmarked tombs spreading out over a city block. The plain slabs are at different heights with the tallest in the middle but all the rows are straight and narrow, allowing one to get completely within the monument but never lost.

Pieces of the Berlin Wall are standing at points all over the city, but this spot by the Sony Center was particularly informative and well-done.

A large demonstration closed many of the roads near Alexanderplatz, so we found a great parking spot in front of the Berliner Dom and walked around Museum Island before heading over… and after snapping a few photos of course.

Following lunch we planned to go to the top of the Fernsehturm (aka the TV Tower) for a cup of coffee but the hour delay was more than we wanted to wait and it was drizzling, so the views weren’t going to be that great. Next time we’ll know to pick up our timed tickets in advance.

On our way back to the car we peeked inside the Pergamon, vowing to spend at least half a day there on our next trip and watched some local teenage groups perform jump routines in front of the Museum of Modern Art.

The title of this post is only a half jest… transferring through Heathrow airport, specifically Terminal 5, has got to be one of the most awful experiences in idiocy that I have ever experienced. Only there can you get off a 15 minute shuttle ride, spend 45 minutes navigating your way through confusing corridors filled with poor signage, unsympathetic security folks and miles of shopping only to wind up checking in at your gate and boarding another bus literally 50 feet from the entrance where you were dropped off.

We received this handy pamphlet in Berlin, thank you Germany…

Yes, it does say that you need to allow 2 hours to make your connecting flight and I can tell you that this estimate is no lie. I think that if you need a double sided brochure with illustrations explaining how to get to your connecting flight, maybe you could have done a better job building the darn thing.

Frankly, I am still a little irritated at having been ‘searched’ FIVE times during this trip. Not to mention the complete bag search at the gate in Heathrow and an agent taking my passport hostage when I needed to go to the bathroom. This same bathroom trip also caused my fifth body search/patdown/harassment.

The one highlight was the duty free store… free samples of Level 42 vodka and cane liquor always put me a good mood at 9:30am.

My dad is 67 years young today and I believe this photo of him is from 1998, the year I graduated college.

Happy birthday, Dad! Enjoy your James Bond martini and remember it’s always happy hour somewhere.  I love you! :)