After dropping off Julie at the airport, I headed out to explore the San Francisco Bay area. As is well-known, the San Andreas Fault passes straight up through the San Francisco peninsula and heads northward out into the Pacific Ocean. The fault is expected to extend over the next fifteen million years up the coastline to the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska. For now it occupies a deep valley up the center of the peninsula along which Interstate 280 has been laid. While it is generally a fool's enterprise to try to detect geological features in an urban setting, the fault line with its man-made lakes is hard to miss. While there is no major crevasse in which to fall, the sides are steep and the rock formations are different. On the west side is Francisco formation sediment and on the east side is Salinian block granite.
My next place of interest was Napa Valley, which also has an interesting geological history, though that is not its current primary claim to fame. Napa Valley has been the second most popular tourist attraction in the state because of its wineries. Julie and I spent a few weekends visiting the Napa Valley wineries while I was stationed at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in nearby Vallejo. That was in 1971 and 1972, so it has been awhile. It surprised me how little Napa Valley had changed. I had expected to see something like Branson, Missouri or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with endless tourist shops and entertainment venues. The only accommodation I saw to the high popularity is that the single highway, California 29, has been four-laned halfway up the valley to Yountville. There are more wineries, and their tasting facilities are more elaborate, but the ambiance of the area is little changed. I was there on a Monday, so I didn't experience a weekend crowd. But I don't think even that would have transformed sedate nature of the area. There was no family-oriented entertainment places. The only enterprises center around the wine culture--eating and drinking and watching them grow. There is a Napa Valley Wine Train, but I didn't see it.
I spent the night primitive camping in Mendocino National Forest, about 50 miles north of Napa Valley.
Mileage: 241. Cumulative mileage: 938.
