We had organized to visit Matthew in San Jose at the end of September, and though our original plan was to fly out of Albany, we instead flew once more out of Syracuse. We had an amazing weekend visiting! We arrived late afternoon on Thursday and after I’d finished my work calls, we went out in San Jose for the evening.
We took the day off on Friday to be tourists in San Francisco. We took the train into the city, biked along the piers, and had oysters and champagne for brunch.
We then took a ferry out to Alcatraz. Though Matthew has been a fan of the moving The Rock forever, this was actually his first time visiting Alcatraz. We took an audio tour around the prison and then spent some time trying to find the location for Matthew to recreate the “green smoke” moment, but anything that looked remotely close was closed to the public :(. Matthew was also quite disappointed that the shower room didn’t look at all like in the movie.
After Alcatraz, we had some time to spare before our dinner reservations, so we did an escape room and then changed for dinner afterwards.
We ate at Ssal which was a Korean tasting menu and it was delicious!
On Saturday, we headed to Napa where we had reservations to taste at two different wineries. The first was Ehlers where Matthew is a member and the second was AXR, which David had found and turned out to be literally across the street! We enjoyed drinking some amazing wine and having a lovely time with some of Matthew’s friends.
On Sunday we had time for Brunch in the morning before Matthew dropped us off at the airport to return back to Highwind. In the next few days, the injectors finally arrived back to us and after one last test drive, we declared the engine issues to be largely resolved!
Winter had truly arrived as we set out from Brewerton in 40 degree mornings!
We set off to blast down the Erie, taking only two days to make it all the way past Manhattan and set up on a mooring in Great Kills Harbor in Sandy Hook.
The next day, David dropped me to shore in the dingy and I headed alone to the airport. I was heading to Cancun for a week of a work event – our annual Employee Appreciation Conference. Meanwhile, David would be doing the New Jersey coast/Delaware River cruise solo with Russ and Jax on InQuest as a buddy boat.
My week in paradise was excellently productive, and David had a prime weather window, so everything went according to plan! I returned to Baltimore to join David in preparing to winterize the boat as we’ll be heading to Key West in a week!
