Archive for the 'Napa Valley' Category
Pacifica Hotels: 25% off, plus bring a toy for a bigger discount
October 29, 2009 5:51am
For a getaway up or down the coast, or in popular destinations inland, you might look into a stay with Pacifica Hotels. The company, largely rooted in California but with locations in Florida and Hawaii as well, has a great promotion going for late fall and early winter. See below for the scoop.
Deal: Under its current online winter promotion, receive 25% off regular rates at Pacifica Hotels properties over the next couple of months. Plus, if you bring along a new, unwrapped toy valued at $10 or more, you get an additional $10 per night off your bill at checkout. The hotel participates in the Toys for Tots program, so your gift will go to children in need.
The deal is good only in California, where Pacifica runs hotels in in Sonoma, San Francisco, Cambria, Pismo Beach, Santa Barbara, Marina del Rey, Redondo Beach, Laguna Beach and San Diego, among other locations. [Corrected at 10:15 a.m. Oct. 29: An earlier version of this post did not make it clear that this deal is good only at Pacifica hotels in California, not in Florida or Hawaii.] Read the rest of this entry »
Get a third night for free at 35 California hotels
October 21, 2009 5:59am
Buy two, get one free. That’s the idea behind the Third Night Free offer at 35 California hotels run by Joie de Vivre, a boutique chain based in San Francisco. Launched to promote the company’s new “Joie of Life” micro-site that focuses on social networking, the deal isn’t being advertised on the chain’s main website. But you can book it there anyway — if you know the code.
The deal is worth hunting up because Joie de Vivre runs a lot of fun and well-located hotels in a range of prices, such as San Francisco’s Hotel Rex and Hotel Vitale, Hotel Angeleno in Los Angeles and Hotel Erwin at Venice Beach. The 411:
Deal: Pretty straightforward. You book a room for three nights in a row, and the third night is free. There are two ways to get the deal: You can book it through the Third Night Free section of the Joie of Life micro-site or go to the regular Joie de Vivre website and enter the code “JOIE” in the “Promo Code” window when making a reservation. The micro-site lists the participating hotels, with nightly rates that start at $79 to $459, depending on the hotel.
Sonoma: Visit wine country after grape crush rush for $75 rooms
October 19, 2009 8:27am
Yes, fall is the season for grape-picking, grape-crushing and festival-hopping in Napa Valley and nearby Sonoma. But lag a little and you may find yourself with better bargains on accommodations. At Sonoma Creek Inn, a budget hotel a couple miles northeast of downtown Sonoma, prices decrease come November.
Deal: The “Stay Longer, Dream More” package at this hotel includes, for $75 per night (pre-tax and based on double occupancy), a queen room and wine-tasting passes for local wineries. Plus, if a better room is available upon check in, you can get an upgrade to the best available room.
That must at least partly cover the “dream more” component of the package title because guests who “stay longer” — as in, stay two nights instead of one — get a package rate of $72.50 per night.
Rooms under a “last minute” special, on right now for stays this week, cost $99 per night, so this late-fall/winter rate is over 20% less than that current offer. The wineries for which you’ll receive tasting passes vary, and tasting fees vary by winery. But you might get passes to, for example, Ravenswood, where tastings run $10-$15, and Paradise Ridge, which charges a $10 fee. Read the rest of this entry »
Napa Valley wine travel: Use Twitter and Facebook to nab a deal during ‘Crush’ season
October 1, 2009 5:56am
TripAdvisor recently named Napa Valley the “undisputed American capital of wine” in its list of Top 10 North American Wine Destinations. Second place went to Sonoma and third place went to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. To celebrate, Napa Valley Marriott Hotel & Spa put up a sale on rooms through Twitter and Facebook for their fans during the 2009 “Crush” grape harvest season. It’s a 72-hour sale that started Sept. 30, so book your rooms by Friday if you want to take advantage of a good deal during this annual event.
Deal: Rooms start at $99 (Sunday through Thursday) and $199 (Friday and Saturday) for stays through Nov. 14. That’s a significant markdown, considering that rates typically range from $209 to $259 weekdays and start at $279 on weekends. The lowest weekday rate I found (on sale) at Hotels.com was $159 per night. This deal is only good on Twitter and Facebook. It’s also worth following the Marriott on Twitter (@napamarriott) because it sometimes gives out free tasting passes to its local winery partners to tweeps who visit. Note that the offer is only good through .
Dining at the source with Outstanding in the Field
May 31, 2009 8:01am
Talk about eating locally. If you’re a traveler of the foodie sort, eat where the goods you’ll ingest are grown — with those who helped grow it — on farm-dining tours offered by Outstanding in the Field.
The small Santa Cruz-based operation arranges events on farms all over California, the U.S., Canada and even Europe that take in guided tours before shifting into sit-down dinners with the food’s local producers. At each event, a long table for dining is set somewhere close to where the food was sourced. Usually that’s a farm, though, according to the website, it might be a ranch, a winery or — wow, picture this — a sea cave.
One of these events typically runs four to five hours, with the cost ranging from $180 to $220 per person. In addition to the farm tours and talks provided during dinner, the price includes a five-course meal with wine.
Can your tummy growls now be heard in the next room? If so, join the club. Read the rest of this entry »
Sundance out of reach? Visit these closer film festivals
January 8, 2009 5:00pm
[Photo: A scene from "Moscow, Belgium," screening Jan. 11 & 12 at the Palm Springs International Film festival. Credit: Moscow-Belgium.com]
Despite the lousy economy, tourism officials in Park City, Utah, expect the atmosphere to be “bustling as usual” next week. That’s when the Sundance Film Festival opens — starting on Jan. 15 and running through Jan. 25.
Sure, Sundance is typically one of the indie film industry’s biggest blowouts, with the best in flicks, parties and people-watching. But if you can’t make it, don’t sit around and mope with your remote control in hand.
Instead, count your pennies saved and get revved up for an against-the-grain plan to visit one of the lesser-known film fests hitting California this late winter and spring. Here are some of various types and sizes for your calendar; some, like the now-running Palm Springs event or the one in Sonoma in April, provide great excuses to plan a weekender away:
Now through Jan. 19: Palm Springs International Film Festival Read the rest of this entry »
California coast trip, Day 7: North to Sonoma, with old enemy fog
January 8, 2009 4:12pm
This was only a 115-mile day — from Half Moon Bay to the northern outskirts of Jenner in Sonoma County — but it seemed bigger. Here’s what my notebook says:
Finally, I get a room with full frontal ocean exposure — the roar and purr of waves all night — and I wake to a solid wall of fog. I can’t even imagine where the horizon is until 7:45 (sunrise, basically), when the veil abruptly lifts. Yup, waves. And cyclists and dog-walkers, using the coastal path that runs right beneath my second-story room.
I put in a mile or two on the path. Mellow neighborhood, much calmer and workaday-feeling than some other beachy areas. Except for the house next door to my hotel, the Cypress Inn on Miramar Beach. That house is a hallucination: an angle where the chimney should be, driftwood art all over, and a Seussian riot of succulents in the side yard. Read the rest of this entry »
12 books of Christmas: ‘Visions of Paradise’
December 20, 2008 6:00am
My new personal hero may be Bronwen Latimer, who created a photographic escape hatch for these gloomy days when the economic news is as overcast as SoCal skies on a stormy day.
Latimer asked National Geographic photographers where, in their view, was heaven on earth. The result is this luscious book, “Visions of Paradise” (National Geographic, $35), which takes a reader to some predictable places (Hawaii), some not so much (Nebraska) and some I’d never heard of (Lago Ypoa National Park in Paraguay).
12 books of Christmas: ‘Galen Rowell’
December 19, 2008 11:42am
You look at the soft-cover version of “Galen Rowell: A Retrospective” (Sierra Club Books, $39.95) and you want to weep — at the beauty of his photography, at the notion that Rowell and his wife, Barbara, were taken too soon. The couple died in a plane crash in August 2002, a shock at the time and a shock still.
This retrospective, with an intro by friend and admirer Tom Brokaw and commentaries by other comrades, contains 180 of his images.
12 books of Christmas: ‘Distinguished Inns’
December 18, 2008 6:00pm
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There is, always, the place that sticks in your mind, that charming little inn that felt almost like home, but with nicer people and better linens.
I love browsing books like “Distinguished Inns of North America (Panache Partners, $34.95) not just because I sometimes aspire to be the kind of traveler who can stay at the Ashby Inn in Paris, Va., but because these lodgings sometimes lead us to places we might otherwise never go.
