The World's Largest...!

Bill Bryson is one of our favorite travel writers.  His books make us roll in laughter.  The scene often looks like this when one of us is reading his books:

C: curled over and laughing with tears welling into his eyes
Me: what?!
C: laughing and pointing at the book, "here!"

When one of us reads his books, the other gets the funniest parts read aloud - every single time.  It's our system and it works :)

In our cool, dark room, we awoke with a fist pump that we made it to 7:00 (time change!) and rose like clouds from the world's poofiest bed (how do I not have a picture??)  It is surprisingly chilly in Napa in the morning, before the sun burns off the cloudy skies.  The weather was dreamy. We just couldn't imagine such a place where you wear shorts during the day and build a fire at night, put on a sweatshirt in the morning and go swimming in the afternoon.  This weather is mighty close to our heaven and if we learned they got piles of snow in the winter...we might never have come back.

How Bryson factors into the morning is this -  We set out together, respecting that we had a few non wine drinkers in our party (quickly, they came to love the grape) and decided to be tourists in our new town.  "Why don't we check out the petrified forest and natural geyser that are nearby?" someone (who will remain nameless) casually mentioned.  So we hopped into our cranberry orange Toyota Camry and drove onward. We blurred past vineyards, wishing our car would magically veer into a tasting, and instead turned by this sign:

We went and actually saw the Worlds Largest Petrified Trees! C and I looked, said "Bryson" in unison, snapped this picture and just laughed.  We did get some great pictures out of the occasion.  It was, all jokes aside, interesting.  We learned that these trees are not trees at all. They are actually ash spewed from a volcano millions of years ago.  The site even had a bear and a small donkey that reminded us of Charlie.  

Were the other trees we saw not found in this forest??

The Giant "tree" - I mean million year old volcanic ash (bum bum bummmm!)

However, our day of Bryson fun was not over! We then headed to see the "Wonder of Nature" that is the "Old Faithful of California" - their words, not mine, Geyser.  

Now, some skeptics might say that this lovely tourist trap was simply a few rocks gathered together with a garden hose scheduled to go off every 60 minutes.  But, I say, it is a tourist trap equipped with a powerful hose, a petting zoo AND a world class gift shop.  We laughed as we watched the geyser spew water for a few minutes.  It was pretty neat, and since I might never get to Yellowstone, I'll take it!  Bryson would have been proud. 

Look carefully and you'll see the geyser - it's hiding behind us!

And, do not worry in the slightest, we indulged in vineyards that afternoon and for the next 5 days :)