Remember how excited Dorothy was when she started out on The Yellow Brick Road?  You could see the thrill of anticipation, the hope and promise on her face. Oh, the joy of it! The singing, the skipping, the cheering, the munchkins! And the technicolor wonderland spreading out as far as the eye could see. Well, that pretty much captures Kip’s and my state of mind at the moment. Yes, we’re headed to our personal mecca, the wine country of Northern California. [For those of you who need to refresh your memory of this golden cinematic moment, we’ve taken the liberty of providing the clip below, courtesy of good old Warner Brothers.]

The excitement begins the minute we hop on the plane. By the time we land at San Francisco International Airport we’re giddy. We pinch ourselves in awe and wonder as we cross over the Golden Gate Bridge (yes, every single time). And in less than half an hour we are seeing our first vineyards. At this point, we reach a state of perpetual exuberance that stays with us the entire trip and even lasts for a little while back at home. Ah, yes, life is good!

We’ll be covering a lot of ground in our short trip, with stops in both Napa and Sonoma, as well as Mendocino’s Anderson Valley. We’ll be dining at scrumptious restaurants each night, sampling luscious wines, and taking diligent notes and photos so we can report back to you on all of it.

One of our missions on this trip is to explore options for bottling our very own Thirsty Kitten wine.  As we reported a few weeks ago, we’ve been in conversation with Crushpad, a custom crush winery based in Sonoma, to potentially use their services to create our own bottling. Yet, as those of you who stay on the pulse of wine news may know, reports began circulating on the internet in late June about Crushpad’s current financial situation. We can’t say we know the full story. These things are always more complex than meets the eye.  Crushpad has indicated that they are open for business as usual, and we are rooting for them. But in the meantime, we’ll be looking at several additional options to make sure we find the one that’s best for us. It seems we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in our research on custom crush services. And to be diligent and thorough, we’ll need to sample many wines and spend extensive time chatting with wine folks who do custom crushes by the barrel. Yes, it’s tough work but a kitten’s gotta do what a kitten’s gotta do.

So this week, we invite you to join us on The Yellow Brick Road. Send us your thoughts, ideas, requests for anything you’d like to hear us report on or things you think we should do. For instance, would you like to see a picture of Kip doing a handstand while holding a glass of wine ? Just ask. We’ll do our best to weave your suggestions into our itinerary. Or tell us stories of your adventures to the places that fill you with giddy excitement. What journeys make you want to sing and skip and cheer? What’s your personal technicolor wonderland? We can’t wait to hear. Cheers!