Goodbye Golden Gate

We left San Francisco this morning and headed back to Sonoma in search of Norm's great-uncle Tom Gidney and we found him, well we found his grave site. Also, we couldn't resist a couple more wineries since we were back in the area. Wow, Mondavi's is really high end, sculptures (note the Welcoming Muse -- how one might be after a few glasses of wine :), paintings, tours (most don't do tours, Norm figures once you taste the wine you'll buy, tours just aren't needed to get you in the wineries any more). Since we have more than our limit of wine already, we only walked about taking in the classy atmosphere. We drove to St. Helena for a walkabout and snack and on to one more winery Norm remembered from 30+ years before -- Charles Krug, part of the Mondavi empire. Another brother, Peter M., broke off from the Mondavis and his sons still run this one. That was goodbye to wine country, and we headed north through winding roads and rolling hills to connect with I-5. And here we are in Yreka, California. Not high  on your travel itinerary but it is known as the county's oldest settlement and the busiest stage stop in California back in 1857. Yes, they had a gold rush back then. Can't think of any other reason to come here.
Norman writes: We had to stop at Vista Point for a last look at the Golden Gate bridge (designed by Joseph Strauss, same engineer behind the Blue Bridge in Victoria) and the look back at the city, even on a crappy gray day, is striking. Look down at the rock wall around the lookout, and the scene is less lovely. Somebody started the custom of autographing the stones -- here's "Steph + Pablo 4-ever" felt-penned onto the rock. How lovely for the couple. Wonder if they're still together? If you plan to do this yourself, hurry, not many spaces are left on the stones.
Breakfast was in Sonoma, then a visit to Mountain Cemetery, where one of my relatives is buried. He's Thomas W. Gidney, my grandmother's brother, who lived down here for about 50 years, and died in 1965, aged 87, a retired real estate salesman whose last address was in Healdsburg, farther north in the Sonoma Valley. I guess there wasn't much of an estate left: his "headstone" is a small bronze plaque on a rod stuck in the ground, beside two other guys who died the same year and were buried from the same funeral home. It's a long way from London, via army service on the Northwest Frontier in India with the Gordon Highlanders in the late-1890s, to this plain hillside cemetery where he lies with other Californians of Italian and Spanish and Irish origins.  He visited us once up in Canada and I have vague memories of him and his car with the running board. Or maybe it's just the old snapshot I remember. And the fact he lived for a time in Joshua Tree, Calif., out in the desert east of Los Angeles. His English wife had died a couple of years before him in Santa Monica,  and there's a note on one of those geneaological websites that she sewed for Queen Victoria as a young woman. No one in the family knows if it's true, and we don't have an old pair of the royal bloomers to prove it. More research to come and it means another trip to California, wonderful.