Days of Wine and Sharks, Vol. IV

Part the Final

(Note: Cary did another write up of what it feels like to be in that shark cage. I highly suggest you click here and read it.

I wake up after possibly the most sound night's sleep ever. Takes me a minute to adjust to where I am or even who I am. Then it hits me that I slept in a bed that folds out of from the wall, the kind that Jack Tripper would have gotten a full half hour out of. I shower and everybody else starts to get up. We have breakfast at the condo and get ready to go.

We’re taking a tour of wine country today, having a limo cart us around. I’ve only been in a limo once before, for a strange, brief ride across my hometown last Christmas. We all pile in and start the drive. The driver, Robert, is a cool guy who knows a lot about the area and the wines made here. I keep an eye on the countryside since I’ve never been in this part of California, but it’s all a bit of a blur.

Here’s the thing about me and wine: I know dick-all about it. I know I like red ones, but not the white ones so much. We hit six or seven wineries over the course of the day. I tried several I liked, but there’s no way I could distinguish them from each other if you put them in front of me. This is the third time I’ve spent a day touring wineries, and I’m none the smarter for it. The fact that I’m usually pretty buzzed at the end of these tours negates any educational benefit that I may get from them. C’est la vie.

The day is a lot of fun though, and it’s cool to check out the architecture of the wineries. The first one we visit is meant to simulate the inside of a wine bottle in form and structure. Fortunately, everybody else in the group knows a little about wine and is able to ask some intelligent questions while I stumble around behind them like Otis, the town drunk from the Andy Griffith Show. I think even Cary’s five-year old daughter was able to ask about ripening schedules by the end of the day while I was grunting about “pour more of that last one. No, not that piece of shit, the other one.”

It’s a pretty great, low-key way to spend the last full day here. We spend several hours touring the wineries, getting back to the condo mid-afternoon. We all crash for a little while, then take a side-trip to the casino just down the road. I hit the penny slots and actually manage to come out slightly ahead by the time we leave. It makes me want to go back to Vegas soon. Honestly, who doesn’t have a bunch of extra money lying around these days to chuck out the window?

Back to the house afterwards, where we stay in and cook for the last night. It’s the perfect way to wind things down. We have a long drive in the morning to get me to the airport before Cary and crew make their long drive home, so we all call it a night fairly early.

Up before dawn the next morning. We’re on our way pretty quickly, since it’s going to be about three hours to the airport. As we pass through San Francisco, I ride over the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, though it is shrouded in a thick fog. The time goes pretty quickly, and before I know it, we’re at the airport. It sucks to have to say goodbye to everybody when it feels like we just started this vacation. The airport is eerily deserted, t the point that I wonder if there’s been some kind of national disaster that I missed. It turns out just be a sleepy Saturday the San Francisco airport. I breeze through security and grab breakfast, getting a bloody Mary to ease into the day.

My flight to Salt Lake City is over in a blink, mostly because I’m out cold for most of it. We land and I’ve got a three hour layover. I end up hanging out at the Wasatch brewpub that Cary told me about, where I discover the wonders of their Polygamy Porter. I talk to an Army drill sergeant for most of the time, and I’m please to find out that management bureaucracy is just as thick and screwed up in the military as it is in the private sector. A sandwich and a couple more beers later and I’m on my way.

On my flights back, I read Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite writers. It’s the story of a woman who vanishes, and the man who had an unrequited love for her who joins the search. Towards the end of the book, when she still hasn’t turned up, I read a passage that hits me so hard I literally have to get up and go splash water on my face in the bathroom. Here it is:

“I loved Sumire more than anyone else and wanted her more than anything in the world. And I couldn’t just shelve those feelings, for there was nothing to take their place.”

Goddammit.

I think Murakami knew he was onto something here, because he set those two sentences apart as their own paragraph. I finish the book and sit there thinking for the rest of the flight. Where I’ve been. What I’ve done. What I haven’t done. I’m back in Atlanta before I know it, and safely back home. I let a couple of people know that I had not become shark bait, and the adventure is over. I turn out the light and go to sleep.

Requiescat in pace.