Loose ends and BottleRock begins

Today we packed up our wine and our stuff to move from St. Helena to Cordelia/Fairfield. BottleRock starts today and hotels were in-sane in the Napa area for this show. We’re talking 800$+ for a rundown shack. So, the Comfort Inn in Cordelia, Ca it is!

We did have some loose ends to clean up before we left town. Acme actually had to have the winemaker of one of the wines we bought run our bottles down, since they were sold out. We also wanted one last breakfast (For this trip) at the Model Bakery. We then had to play car jenga to figure out how to fit all of the wine and our tiny amount of luggage into the car.

Over the mountains we go and off to Cordelia. The Comfort Inn is as you would expect. A rough transition, especially after our St. Helena gem, but it will do for our purposes.

Trying to figure out where to park for this show is a bit of a hash. The weather is dicey today. We’ve seen a couple of decent rains while we were driving and I really don’t want to have to rely on Uber/Lyft if we’re rained out. There are apparently 30k tickets for this event and for a fairly small venue that *smack dab* in the middle of town? That’s a challenge. In the end, we decided to park at Napa Valley College and take the bus in to the central transit hub.

We missed a few of the early bands, but caught Mike D who looks like he’s a million years old and doing the gig for the money. Sad. He actually had another dj on stage with him who seemed to be doing all of the heavy lifting. We caught the tail end of Earth Wind and Fire. We moved onto Coin who put on a great show (Right until some lady kicked me in the kneecap. Forking meow! Watch where your feet are folks!) We wandered around a bit to find some dinner and caught Incubus and a band called Tank and the Bangas. Tank was excellent! Incubus? There is a reason I don’t remember listening to much of them when they were big.

From there we went to make sure we had good seats for St. Paul and the Broken Bones. They do not disappoint! Excellent show, great energy, great musicianship. Paul Janeway (their lead singer) got a pretty good dig in a the Chainsmokers when he quipped ‘Yeah, we would sound just like them ‘cept we left our laptop at home.’ Cold and slightly damp from all of the moisture (not really rain) we decided to listen to the Chainsmokers as we walked out.

We discovered a miscalculation with our plan to take the bus back to where we had parked. Unless you left well before the final acts even got on stage, the police were holding all of the buses until the venue cleared out. This meant we sat on a bus for more than 45 minutes – more than enough time for us to have walked to the car. Tomorrow I think we’re going to park a bit closer and walk both ways. Fingers crossed it warms up and dries out a bit for tomorrow!