Not even wanting to take advantage of the hotel’s meager
breakfast bar, we share a McDonald’s breakfast next door with one of the area’s
homeless gentlemen before picking up the pieces of our broken trip.
It’d been a bad night of sleep at an overpriced and
cleanliness challenged hotel way outside of our destination of Lodi along a
barren stretch of Interstate 5 at the intersection of highway 12. Realizing
that we couldn’t make a vacation of what is essentially a truck stop, and not a
very good one either, we promptly cancelled the rest of our stay (see our
previous report for the details).
Watch the Video!
Now, it’s Memorial Day weekend and we have no place to stay in Lodi. I quickly get out the laptop and take advantage of the local WiFi and start looking. Everyplace I check in Lodi is booked up.
I remember a few years ago, we stayed at a nice all-suites
hotel in Rancho Cordova, just east of nearby Sacramento. I find the hotel, now
a Hyatt House hotel (It's since been extensively renovated and is now a Doubletree hotel - Ed), and they have a reasonably priced room that I can cancel
as late as 4pm that day without penalty.
I book it to have a guaranteed nice place to sleep if we are
unable to find a hotel up in Amador County’s gold and wine country, where we
are headed to today.
Just south of Lodi along Highway 88, is the town of
Lockeford. This pleasant little village is home to Lockeford Meat Company,
which is world-famous for their sausage. Since Monday will be a holiday, this
will be our only chance to stop to pick up some chorizo, Okie sausages,
jalapeno sausages, and…their claim to fame…the smoked Dakota bratwursts.
I’ll need to stop at a nearby Rite Aid to get a cheap ice
chest and keep these chilled for a couple of days.
Letty likes to browse at the pawn shop at the corner and I
don’t mind visiting with the friendly folks of Lockeford Jewelry and Loan, who
are also very accommodating and understanding of wheelchair user’s needs. It
doesn’t look accessible but there’s a ramp around the back where you also get
to see the treasures in the back room.
Sausaged up, we continue on up to Highway 49 and go straight
to Plymouth and the Shenandoah Valley, our go-to wine country experience.
We’ve gone here many times, and it’s still a great place to
taste and buy wines, especially the big red that our state is known for,
Zinfandel.
Sipping some reds at Shenandoah Vineyards helps guide us to
the perfect mixed case. We get a pasta buffet at Villa Toscano along with a
case of old vine zin and another case of pinot grigio.
A drive to the nearby Shenandoah Inn reveals two very nice
accessible rooms with wine country views to die for. Unfortunately, they do not
have availability on Saturday night, which is right in the middle of our stay.
Our trip to Lodi has become a weekend in the capital.
Still, we came to see Lodi and Lodi we will see. The rest of
Amador’s wineries will wait until tomorrow; we’re headed down the hill.
After checking into the Hyatt, and making sure the room is
good (it is), we head south on Sunrise Boulevard for a scenic, back road way
into Lodi that skips the capital and saves us about 10 miles.
Downtown Lodi has undergone quite a renaissance. About a
dozen local wineries from the Lodi AVA have tasting rooms here. Restaurants and
watering holes ranging from funky dives to gourmet, white tablecloth dining
rooms dot the landscape. Live music comes out from everywhere.
We’d come to hear some music at one of the tasting rooms but
the extreme decibels blow us back out the door. Instead, we head across the
street to Ollie’s Pub…one of the afore mentioned dives…which is next to Field
Family Wines. We could avail ourselves of the live music from Field’s, while
watching the A’s and Giants playing on big TVs, drinking a cold brew, and getting
to know some of the locals…some more sober than others.
A stroll around downtown tells us that the latest Fast and
Furious sequel is a big hit at the local multiplex and you can meet a lot of
girls sitting on the bench outside of the Take 27 bar when they come out for a
smoke break…hey, Tim’s still single!
For dinner, it’s the Lodi Beer Company at the other end of
downtown where we have what Letty claims is the best mac ‘n cheese she’s ever
had. Tim has a burger and I get the French dip. Both are good, as is some of
their signature brew made in the center-room brewery sitting about 10 feet away
from our table.
It’s dark when we leave on this Friday night but the area is
far from sleepy. The sidewalks are crowded with daters, teens, and people just
enjoying the music wafting out of every other bar.
Since it’s been a long day after a close to sleepless night,
we make our way back up to the Hyatt to rest up for the rest of our trip to
Lodi, which has now become a weekend in Sacramento.
Stay tuned.
Darryl
Copyright 2013 – Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment