We left Vegas and flew to San Francisco and drove from the airport up to Napa, in time for my birthday present, which was a massage for the two of us (I thought that a relaxing massage in Vegas may have gone to waste if we then lost all of our money). We (and by we, I mean I) found a place to have them at SpaFinder – which turned out to be a lovely little storefront inside a strip center in Napa. The spa was very soothing, M and I sat in the waiting area with magazines and cucumber water while we waited for our masseuses to retrieve us.
The couples massage was actually a little odd – we had two masseuses with two very different philosophies of massage. Mine was a small, spunky woman in her sixties, and M’s was an average-sized woman in her mid thirties. Mine prefaced the massage by saying I should tell her if anything hurt, M’s did not. Mine was bending and contorting my body to stretch it in ways it had never been stretched, M’s did not. Mine gave me an exuberant scalp massage (read: crazy, Medusa-like hair with lotion in it), M’s did not. Mine definitely crossed the boundaries into the painful, while M’s did not. All in all, I felt very relaxed, though the next day I was a little sore. M was not as impressed, though I don’t know what I should have expected.
As we left, my masseuse ran out the door to catch us and ask us where we were going to dinner. We were glad that she did, as we had no idea, and were just going to ask at the hotel. She told us to head to the Rutherford Grill, and that it had the best food in town (well, in Rutherford). We checked it out on our phone web pages, and we saw that it was owned by the same people that own Houston's. We guessed that we could do worse, but that at least someone had recommended it. Dinner was pretty good - all the food was locally inspired and they had local wines, so all in all a good way to start the trip.
