How to Avoid the Crushing Napa Valley Traffic
Car. Carriage. Bike. Balloon. There are lots of ways to tour the Napa Valley. I prefer to kayak, paddling the Napa River and docking in downtown Napa, within walking distance of breweries, wineries, restaurants, and hotels.
Recently, I booked a tour with Enjoy Napa Valley and met my small group at the public launch site on Main Street.
The Napa River winds lazily through the wine region — its brackish waters the perfect playground for all kinds of birds and the occasional otter and seal. A dolphin even made a splash after making its way up the river in 2015.
If anyone qualifies as a river historian (aka riverlorian) it’s the owner of Enjoy Napa Valley, Justin Perkins. He’s a gifted storyteller who claims he’s spent more time on the Napa River than anyone alive — and it shows. On a day when a light breeze kept us cool on the tidal river, he led us on a gentle paddle as he shared stories of the tanneries, bordellos, bars and bawdy characters of early Napa. (Napa had the largest red-light district of any California city of its size in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).
One of the river’s landmarks is the 1877 Borreo Building, a handsome stone structure that’s been everything from a feed store to a car dealership. Today, it’s the home of San Diego-based Stone Brewery, a hot spot for haute cuisine and tasty craft beers. The patio overlooks the river with plenty of social distancing for the growing segment of beer lovers in a region best known for wine. Or is it?
Perkins said something on the paddle that made realize there’s a longstanding tradition of beer-drinking in the Napa Valley. “It takes a lot of beer to make good wine,” he quipped, explaining that many Napa winemakers prefer beer on those hot days during crush. At Stone Brewery, I wet my whistle with a flight of four 4-ounce tasters paired with a tangy platter of house-smoked barbecue ribs and brisket.
An overnight stay is a good investment when you’re imbibing, and the River Terrace Inn is within walking distance of downtown tasting rooms, restaurants and the popular Oxbow Market. General Manager Will Farrow showed me, firsthand, how the rooms are cleaned for heightened guest safety. “We strip the rooms, then we leave them vacant for 24 hours. The HVAC system continues to clean the air and then the housekeeper uses a peroxide disinfectant on all the surfaces that are touched by the guest.” After the housekeeper is finished, he says the entire room is sprayed with a very fine mist of another sanitizing chemical that kills any bacteria or virus within 10 minutes .
Enough said. After a tasty dinner on the River Terrace Inn patio overlooking the river, I slept soundly, and awoke to another day of outdoor activities, including a morning bike ride. As I rode along the new riverfront bike path, I looked out at a couple of kayakers who seemed to be paddling effortlessly toward the oxbow in the river. That’s when I remembered something I learned a few years back, when I first paddled the Napa River.
“If you follow the tides, you can do 12 or 13 miles a day,” says Craig Smith, Executive Director of the Downtown Napa Association. And because Smith lives in Napa, he knows how to time the tides perfectly.
“One of the coolest things we do with the sun still up,” he says, is to go out with the tide toward Vallejo, sit still for about 20 minutes and then let the tide take you back to Napa under a full moon. It takes just a couple of hours.”
It’s no wonder downtown Napa has become such a popular tourist destination — second only to the famed Napa Valley wineries.
For more information on safety procedures and things to do in Napa:
Downtown Napa Association: https://donapa.com/
For package rates on overnight stays, see River Terrace Inn https://www.riverterraceinn.com
For kayak tours, rentals and bicycling tours, see Enjoy Napa Valley http://www.enjoynapavalley.com
For more information on Stone Brewing, see https://www.stonebrewing.com/
