Connected to Garlic City Café

Meanwhile, back in California, we collected our hired car and went exploring: a gentle trip to start with, just as far as Gilroy.

Gilroy is the Garlic Capital of the World: it says so, right there on the wall, and there are allium-themed motifs on much of the street furniture. It wasn't Gilroy's fault that we had turned up in April, when the garlic is entirely inactive, in the slack time between tidying up from one garlic festival and starting to prepare for the next, when there is not so much as a haze of green in the garlic fields. It's still an attractive little town with some splendid old buildings ('old' in this context might mean 1905 - everything's relative), some pretty little houses, a fine variety of murals and a Carnegie library. By the time we'd had enough of these low-key delights, we were ready for lunch and the Garlic City café was calling.

Lunch began with the most wonderful garlic soup, a perfect balance of creamy and savoury with a distinct but not overpowering tang of garlic, We followed this with sandwiches, garlic chickrn for me, calamari steak for durham_rambler on the grouns that he'd never heard of calamari steak, and this was his chance to find out what it was. (The answer wasn't obvious from eating it, though further reseach indicates that it's just the body of the squid cut into steaks rather than into rings). Ever more intrepid, he followed this with the garlic ice cream. I had a spoonful to taste: it was exactly as advertised, a very good creamy ice cream inexplicably flavoured with garlic. Our friendly and efficient server was Karla with a K. At the table behind us, a group of Italians were discussing the dishes their mothers used to cook, and their attempts to replicate them.

The road out of town up into the hills brought us among the vines to Sarah's Vineyard, and we stopped for the first wine tasting of the trip. The five wines we tasted were the Clos de la Madonne (a Rhône-style white, marsanne/roussanne/viognier blend, well-chilled which accentuated the freshness but tempered the richness of the viognier and marsanne. Since I don't like the rather gluey quality of much marsanne, I enjoyed this, but it seemed a waste of viognier), a chardonnay, a pinot noir with a distinct flavour of cloves, the Clos de la Madonne red and a merlot. I enjoyed everything we tasted, not to mention the conversation, but we were disconcerted by the prices - and happy with the local style of paying for the tasting and therefore feeling no obligation to buy.

Then on into the hills, meaning - and completely faiing - to pick up Skyline Boulevard: you are in a maze of twisty mountain roads, all the same..., differentiated by a clearing full of fruit trees here, a pool of forget-mr-nots there. There were some magnificent trees, not all of them redwoods, and some striking houses, but mostly we concluded for the first but not the last time, that we fifn't know the way to San Jose - despite which, we did eventually make it back to Sunnyvale in time to dine en famille at Thai Basil.