Why Bottle Wine? ... When you can have someone do it in your Parking Lot?

The van I was riding in pulled off the highway in Lompoc, California, amid vineyards and processors in Santa Barbara County. As we turned onto Industrial Way, I encountered a type of outsourcing I didn't know existed. 

Parking Lot Bottling.

A large 18-wheeler size vehicle was opened up like a giant food truck, with big awning flaps propped open.  From the rear, a team of men were unloading boxes. 

The static sounds of a cranked-up boom box spewed a peppy song in Spanish with lots of drum beats and horns. A crew of workers lifted cartons from a conveyor hooked to the back of the truck, and carried them over to smaller transport vans. 

The winemaker who was about to take my friends and I up to the hills to see the vineyards stopped to explain to us that the truck is a mobile wine-bottling facility. Inside the truck is a fully automated operation.  You can see through the wide sides that a carousel rotates around, pumping the bottles full of wine. 

Labels are applied and then the bottles are corked. 

At the end of the process, the bottles are placed in cartons and slid down the metal conveyor where the workers stand outside to receive and carry them to waiting vans. 

It struck me as a clever alternative, so that a small winery need not maintain its own bottling equipment. It's outsourcing at its best. Literally outside. In the parking lot.

 

The Order of the Tasting at Domaine De La Cote

 

I'm partaking in a wine tasting. Four bottles are offered. I would have thought that we would start light and finish with heavy. Nope. 

The wines were offered in the order in which the vinter had just finished leading my friends and I through the vineyards. We toured Domaine De La Cote in Lompoc, Santa Barbara County, California, a few minutes earlier. We started with Memorius. That was the field on top of the property, with the most expansive views of the valley. 

Bloom's Field (photo credit: Laura Lang)

We next moved down to Bloom's Field. From that vantage, we looked down the steep hillside -- La Cote. And finally, she pointed across the expanse toward the plantings below a large chestnut tree -- Sous le Chene. 

Winemaker Julia Wiggin

Tasting Room (Photo Credit: Laura Lang)

Us, learning that the delicious wines we are tasting are sold out.

Cool Heads at the Cook and the Cork

Random discovery of a restaurant in Coral Springs, Florida. I searched online for a place to meet up with family halfway between our two locations.

The Cook and the Cork Yelped at me. It checked all the boxes. Outdoor table (COVID necessity). Locally sourced food. Creative menu. Founder/Chef/Owner graduated from the CIA (that is, Culinary Institute of America). Check Check Check Check Plus.

The food was delicious and everything about it was charming. (Of course, everything seems better in balmy weather). At the end of dinner, chef stopped by to chat. He apologized. "For what?, we asked." The kitchen staff was forced to improvise with camping stoves and propane cylinders, cooking part of the dinner in the parking lot. There had been a utility gas line rupture nearby, so their gas feed had been cut off. What a coolheaded guy! As unrattled as he acted, he might as well have been in the other CIA.

Golfing in Florida...Or...Working Around the Wildlife

I don't love spectators; especially not that one

Lead the way, please

This would be amazing except there are dozens more who look like him (or her?)

18th Hole: Time to take off

Amar is Born (and Kunafa is the Star)

All along Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, Florida, there are lots of places for good food. But when COVID forced people to stay home, it also crushed several eateries. Although some restaurants succumbed to the stress and uncertainty dished up by COVID, a new place was born. Amar Mediterranean Bistro, a genuine Mediterranean eatery opened smack in the middle of the pandemic. Nicholas Kurban, the owner/founder is of Lebanese descent. 

My husband and I walked up without a reservation and asked for a table for two. The hostess studied the bookings and shook her head, apologizing that there was no availability. A confident-looking lanky man, well-pressed-dressed, glided over to the entrance stand and peered over the hostess’ shoulder. I figured he had to be the owner, working it to squeeze us in. He pointed to the seating chart, spoke softly to her and then addressed us. “We can seat you but the table turns in 90 minutes for a reservation. Could that work?”

“Of course,” I said, “We’ve been married for decades. We don’t need to talk. We can just eat.” We were hungry. 

The waitress brought us warm, puffy, just-baked pita with a dish of thick homemade hummus to munch on while reading the menu. Top notch. And, we learned later, Amar runs a commissary nearby, selling them. 

When I opened my menu, I headed right to desserts. They serve Kunafa. That clinched it for me. The first and only time I ate Kunafa was in Amman, Jordan while on the Global Scavenger Hunt. Kunafa is on my list of reasons to be alive. It’s melted gooey salty cheese, topped with a hardened crust of pistachios and sugar (think creme brûlée only exponentially better).

When Amar’s owner, Nicolas Kurban swung by our table to check on us, I chatted with him to get the scoop. He has an impressive background in food and hospitality. When the pandemic hit, he was a vice president for Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants and traveled all the time. Before that, he was corporate VP of food and beverage for Four Seasons Hotels in the Asian Pacific . Earlier roles included  fine dining operations for Wynn Resorts, and director of operations for top chef Thomas Keller's Bouchon restaurants. Obviously, the guy knows his way around the restaurant world. 

The pandemic cut off his business travel, so he used the opportunity to open this restaurant with his wife near their South Florida home. Several recipes are from his dad’s restaurant in Lebanon and his grandmother’s specialties, with input from his Venezuelan wife. His goal is for all people, not just Lebanese, to appreciate the food. 

Oh boy. Did I ever. And the best of all was Kunafa for dessert. It’s rich. It’s sweet. Just as delicious as I remembered. 

Kennedy Space Center: Out of this World During the Pandemic

Here's something to take your mind off the COVID pandemic.

Who was the first person to travel in space? (Answer: Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet who circled the earth in 1961).

Who was the first person to walk on the moon? (Answer: Neil Armstrong, American from the three-man Apollo 11 in 1969).

I knew those answers cold, as would everybody who lived in America through the 1960s. The pivotal space race moments are etched into our personal history.

I visited the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral, Florida and got a full-on dose of nostalgia and admiration for America's astounding achievement. Although the Kennedy Space Center (or "KSC" as it's known), is operational as a launch facility, it has also been developed as a theme park, inviting visitors to experience space exploration. Much of the visitor center mimics a Disney theme park. 

Rocket Garden

One of the Gift Shops

There are IMAX movies, virtual reality booths and a children's planet playroom. And crummy food with sugary sodas.

But, some of the exhibits grabbed my attention. The first Dragon spacecraft that shuttled cargo and people to the international space station is on display. You can see burn marks and wear and tear on its skin from the trips to and from the earth. 

In my opinion, the real deal, the real reason to invest a day of your life is to visit the Apollo/Saturn V center. To achieve that requires making it the first order of business after passing through the theme park turnstile and security check. A quick glance at a map will indicate the location of kiosks for scheduling reservations on the buses to the launch area. Securing bus seats for as early as possible locks in the right to see real rockets. The 20-minute ride transports you across the vast property and reveals how space exploration is evolving today. 

NASA partners with private companies to send crews and equipment to support space stations and satellites. The only way a tourist can see beyond the theme park is by riding the bus. 

In fact, the passenger depot is festooned with logos of SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk. He has been quoted as saying, "I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars."

We passed the Vehicle Assembly Building (known as the "VAB"). It was built to assemble the Apollo/Saturn V rocket for the moon launch in 1969. The high bay in the center allows the rockets to be stacked vertically and then rolled out to the launch pad. Some fun facts: The doors are the largest in the world. They are 456 feet high and take 45 minutes to close. The American flag painted on the side is the largest in the world, measuring 209 feet tall and 110 feet wide. 

The Vehicle Assembly Building ("VAB")

Our bus passed by Blue Origin, the company established by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. His vision is to enable "a future where millions of people are living and working in space for the benefit of Earth."

When we disembarked at the Apollo/Saturn V Center, we had to wait outside a closed gate for about seven minutes to allow the crowd inside to move through. Standing there and staring at the doors turned out to be fun. The loudspeaker cranked out one 1960s hit after another. Think: "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" by The Animals. You can't stand there without swaying to the music, smiling and if you know the words, singing along. A ticker tape-type feed above the portal ran a series of '60s fun facts. 

Time Magazine named three Apollo astronauts as Man of the Year in 1968. They were Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders. They were the first humans to witness and photograph an Earthrise. Their mission was the second crewed spaceflight flown in the Apollo program. (Apollo 7 was manned but it stayed in Earth's orbit). After a steady flow of 1960s facts like the cost of the first Big Mac in 1968 (49 cents) and the most popular names for newborns (Michael and Lisa), the gates opened. 

The Control Center for Apollo 8 is preserved intact in a theater where they showed videos of the launch and television broadcasts. It draws goosebumps. While you take in the vista of mission control desks, you see President Kennedy on a giant screen saying, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard because...that challenge is one that we...intend to win."

A real rocket hangs horizontally from the ceiling. It was not sent into space because in 1972, NASA shut down the Apollo program before it could be launched. That was not long after Apollo 13's mission ("Houston, we have a problem") was aborted but returned safely to earth. 

I sized up my visit feeling that the KSC did a great job of stirring pride and patriotism while acknowledging failures. For me, the thrill was in the last images I recalled. In 1969, people all over the world gathered around their television sets cheering to the real-time broadcast of humans walking on the moon. Many onlookers, no matter where in the world, were waving American flags. 

The future of space travel is uncharted and thrilling, but for me, having lived through the first amazing breakthrough and revisiting it at KSC was pretty awesome. 

Tee-shirt for sale in the KSC gift shop

Fingers Crossing at Amtrak

There is only one place in the entire United States where you can load your automobile onto an Amtrak train and accompany it nonstop to Florida. The embarkation point is Lorton, Virginia. I happened to find myself 3 miles away from the station when I happened to be stranded, unable to drive on the icy highways. How perfect is it to be steps away from a solution out of the predicament? How perfect would it be to tuck our car into the train, settle ourselves into passenger seats and snooze on the overnight voyage?

 The hitch? Sold out. So, here we sit in the parking lot, hoping to go standby. Hoping that the mob in the waiting room falls short of the capacity. Fingers crossed.

Epilogue:

Snap. Sadly, the train was full. We were not among those lucky people who Amtrak welcomed aboard.