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Wine and geeks and gondolas: girls and boys together having fun

Courtesy of Jonas (and Courtney for the bus!) we had a geek out in vino-ville yesterday. A herd of 24 (or 26 depending on your math and the time of day) descended on Napa. We picnicked at VS Sattui, where a few of us tasted (the one free tasting of the day - hit Sonoma for the free tastings!) while the others teetotaled. Jonas and Stephanie found a most snacky dessert - chocolate pretzels (think chocolate teddigrams) and this sublime dipping sauce with an improbably perfect combination of pear and cinnamon with caramel. Like a psycho apple butter. I had to snatch some for my own pantry as shown below. Yeah, it remains unopened (I hoard; it’s restraint that gives me the warm feeling all over). Hey Mike, you better hurry home.

Then we did nature tourism0-trekking. From the petrified forest (did you know St. Helena was a volcano??) — I especially liked this shot –

and the geyser, you could hear just the most inappropriate comments - it was clear none of us left our real lives too far behind. Then we went to Sterling, which was pricey but tasty (as long as you kept on keepin’ on with the tastings). On the trip down the hill (Sterling has a fancy gondola ride), we had a little incident. Mischievous, sauced geeks vs gondola and gravity. Bounce bounce. We didn’t fall, but we probably coulda, and got some pretty nasty looks from the crew as they (off in the distance) scrambled to restart the gondola. They eventually sent a truck from which descended a guy who pressed a button to get us moving again (kind of anticlimatic). And yeah, when you’re already pushing Treo-photography to the limits, it’s best not to take pictures while howling with laughter.

I don’t even think he gave us a dirty look when we (docilely) floated by, but I can’t be sure ’cause I was laughin’ too hard. Probably not, I bet they rock the gondola during the off hours. Oh yes indeedy.

As the Treo shots show, I didn’t have a real camera then, being the non-camera born in Rochester never-worked-for-Kodak iconoclast I tend to pose as. But I actually have been suffering camera envy all week, and got one this AM (in time for the food pR0n up above). Not sure I’m gonna keep it, but you’ll start seeing better pictures soon. In case you’re interested in what the rest of the pro-quality camera toting crew captured, the flickr tag for yesterday is (teehee) Rockin Gondola.

The group was great - some people I knew pretty decently, others I’d seen and barely talked with before, and still others completely new. Because we were not geeking, we didn’t start a company, invent a new AJAX type thing, or a new programming language, but we did talk about having a “geek prom” (spurred by the fact that all of the East Bay seemed to be on prom night), outings to Winchester and other places and also a more oenophile wine outing.

But in my book the exceptional factor of the group (beyond that I liked them all) was that it was almost 50% women. And if a pugnacious warrior like Jonas can build around him a group of really competent, interesting women, why can’t other guys?