Honeymooners!! (part 3)

Tuesday morning, we woke up bright and early for our hot air balloon ride!  We had to be at the meeting spot at 5:30 am, but we were so excited that it wasn't that hard to get up.  And I think our bodies were still one central time, so they thought it was 7:30!

 I was looking rough, but so flipping excited!!

 Henderson had to sign our lives away.  After this point, they gathered us all up and told us who our pilots would be.  They also said that the balloons were FAA regulated aircrafts (who knew?) and that because the fog was so thick that morning we wouldn't be able to fly over Napa Valley!  We were pretty bummed, but we still went along with them to the Sacramento River Valley, which was about 45 minutes away.  We didn't get the views of wine country, but it was still absolutely breathtaking and worth every penny!!

 This is one of the balloons going up.  These are the largest balloons and baskets in the country.  Our balloon had 20 passengers plus the pilot in it, so they were pretty hefty!  

 Another balloon going up

 The inside of our balloon

 Sooo excited!!!

 This is how our pilot "steered."  We had to go with the wind, but he was able to move us up and down with different bursts of propane.

 Beautiful views!

 We were up in the air about an hour.  It was very smooth riding.  I never got nervous or scared about being up so high.  In fact, on the form we had to sign, we had to verify that we weren't afraid of heights!  When it came time to landing, I did get a little nervous.  One of the other passengers asked our pilot if he had ever wrecked while landing - his response: "The wind made us wreck a couple of times!"  We had a tough time finding a landing spot because of the wind, but our pilot finally found one.  Some of the workers for the balloon company met us over there.  It was a good thing, because we had a pretty rough landing.  The workers were able to hold up our basket to keep us from falling over.

After we landed, we headed back to the hotel we all met at and had a celebratory champagne brunch.  There were three other couples at our table with us and two of them were honeymooning as well!  One of them was from Virginia and the other from Wisconsin - each of them said their weddings actually had temperatures higher than ours!  It made me feel a lot better about the heat at our wedding!

 We headed back to the Inn and got ready for another day sightseeing!  We decided to do a picnic at a winery, so we headed to Oxbow public market to find some picnic food.  We were thinking they'd have club sandwiches, pimento and cheese, etc.  We were wrong.  

 They had lots of great cheeses!  

 Henderson got a roast beef sandwich from this vendor...

 And I got a shrimp taco from this vendor, along with some chips and guacamole!  

 Waiting for my tacos.

 We headed back towards St. Helena - they have several wineries with beautiful views.  We found one we liked, Rutherford Winery, and did a tasting and bought one of their bottles.  This is the picnic backpack the Inn supplied us with.  It was perfect!  It had plates, napkins, silverware, a corkscrew, and wine glasses!

 Our delicious lunch!

 Another ring shot

 Rutherford Hill - where we picnicked.

 We had a little over an hour to kill, so we just road around looking at the beautiful countryside.  We even found a national park to look around in.  Unfortunately, I fell asleep during the park visit!  I can't help it - you put me in a car, I'm going to sleep!

 Next up was our coffee tasting at Napa Valley Coffee Roasting Company.  When I saw this option on the list of activities the innkeepers supplied us with, I knew Henderson would love it!  And I was right!

 He was so pumped!!

 We each got one of these trays.  Each glass had coffee from a different region.  

 We smelled, and then did a cupping with each of the different coffees.  We got to pick our favorite of those three, and say what specifically we liked about them.  Then we played around with a few different brews until we came up with King's Brew.  Now, if we want any more of it, we just have to call and order another bag!  Pretty neat!

 That's the roaster behind us - they actually roast their own coffee there!

I was so surprised by how hot it was!  We were so excited to be going to a cooler climate, but we didn't get what we expected!

 For dinner that night, we headed to Grace's Table in downtown Napa

  I ordered some sort of chicken and Henderson had the Southern Country boil.  :)

 Enjoying another delicious dinner

 In our going away basket with all of the food from the wedding, we had a lot of cake!  We couldn't eat it all Saturday night and our stomachs were still too nervous Sunday, so we decided to take it to California!  When we got to the security at the airport, Henderson asked if we could take it on.  The security guard said, "No, you can't take wedding cake on.  I'm going to have to confiscate it and test it!"  Luckily he was only kidding, and we got to take our cake to Cali.  Tuesday night was the first time we weren't too full to eat any.  It was kind of funny how our cake made it's cross-country trip!