I flew this week-end to Orange County to visit Minh Chau. She will be in Southern California until December to finish her teaching credential. We took pictures of more paintings by Minh Chau that her parents have kept.

Welcome to our new website! After we got married and started adding more content, it just felt natural for us to change our domain name and the presentation to reflect our combined personalities better. We hope you will enjoy it!

To celebrate our up coming first wedding anniversary, we spent the week-end in Napa Valley. We woke up at 4:30am to drive to Calistoga to join an organized bike tour. Napa Valley is incredibly beautiful and fresh, smelling of luxurious trees and vines. Driving there was an absolute pleasure. Since we arrived early, we had breakfast in Calistoga in the morning. The town is charming and relaxing. After checking in, we started cycling through several vineyards and wineries. The first one we went to was Benett Lane. We found out they make chocolate wine sauce! After that, we went to Vincent Arroyo where some guy showed us the vineyard’s thirty year-old vines and explained his techniques for making wine. We tasted their chardonnay and merlot.
We then cycled to Cuvaison and had a picnic at their lovely vineyard. The sun was starting to break through; it was getting really hot. We cycled again and went to Frank Family and tasted their champagne which was supposedly one of Marilyn Monroe’s favorites. Frank Family Winery was our last stop and we decided to get back in our car to drive to Santa Rosa . Driving on highway 12 was … hard, very windy and narrow and steep sided, going uphill, downhill. But soon enough, we got the gear shifting right. We had a romantic dinner at Syrah, a really good French restaurant. Their crab cakes were divine! On Sunday, we took the long way home and drove all the way back to the Golden Gate Bridge on CA-1, stopping every now and then to take pictures.We stopped at Bodega Bay, Tomales Bay and Stinson Beach. CA-1 is amazingly beautiful … but is even harder to drive than 12. There were some sharp turns where you would seriously either leap over into the ocean or off the mountain if you missed. Driving back in the crowded streets of San Francisco felt super easy.
Napa Valley was such a charming and romantic destination. I can’t believe it’s been a year since Minh Chau and I got married. If you’re wondering what’s like to be married, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened in my life!