Geyserville Grapevine by deTraci Regula - August 2018
Summer days in Geyserville have been hot but beautiful. We’ve been having temperatures clinging to the 90s and, oddly, often rising even higher on the weekends. I heard once in Southern California that automobile traffic patterns can also affect weather, but in the relatively low-traffic area of Geyserville, I wouldn’t expect that to necessarily hold true.These weekend heat spells make me wonder.
One change of note in “downtown” Geyserville—our tiny public park is no more. While this would be a tragedy in most places, the majority of Geyserville seems happy to see the unusually-designed small plot of land back as a temporarily vacant lot before it is redeveloped. The avant-garde park design didn’t seem to blend well with the old-west flavor of Geyserville, and the unusual disposition of plants and ropes and rocks made it a bit unclear to some as to whether it was a park at all.
Just up the road...While Geyserville does not have its own weekly street fair and music fest, we are ideally located to take advantage of the Friday Nights in the Plazaput on by the Cloverdale Arts Alliance in Cloverdale and theTuesdays in the Plaza event in Healdsburg. Slightly less well-known beyond our own borders is the Thursday night “Happy Hour” series at Trentadue, where each week a band plays and a gourmet food truck provides bites to go along with very specially priced glasses of Trentadue wine. Bring your chairs and join in before the summer is over! August second features The Third Rail with Food for Purchase fromCroques & Toques followed by a special Rebuild North Bay Fire Relief Fund edition of Happy Hour Thursday held up at the Ranch at Lake Sonoma. Jinx Jones plays and food options areYay! Paella andNellies’ Oysters—plus the usual array of wines from Trentadue. All proceeds go to the Rebuild North Bay Fire Relief Fund.
Then it is back to “normal”with the August 16th event held at Trentadue, with rock & country group Court ’N’ Disaster and Venezuelan food from Pilon Kitchen. The following week features old-school rock fromThe Hots and food offered by A Guy and His Grill. The last show of the season is on August 30th, with the Pointless Sisters Rockin’ Show Band closing the summer with lively dance music. Yay!Paella makes a repeat food visit with Got Balls Meatball Factory. Trentadue is located at 19170 Geyserville Avenue; Geyserville, CA 95441-9603; T: (707) 433-3104 · info@Trentadue.com
In addition, the Geyserville Grille is offering periodic music nights and some special dinners—call for details.The Geyserville Gun Club cocktail lounge in the heart of downtown at the Oddfellows Building also has a full roster of music acts on Saturday nights and some of the best and most unusual “bar food” in the county. August music dates include the Awesome Hotcakes on the 4th,Blue Radio on August 11th, and the Blind Barbers on August 18th.
I had an enjoyable time recently renting a boat to explore Lake Sonoma for the first time with some out-of-area visitors. The day spent on the calm green waters made me curious about what the area was like before the Warm Springs Dam was put into place, and I was pleased to discover just the right resource to answer some of my questions. “Before Warm Springs Dam—A History of the Lake Sonoma Area, Sonoma County, California” is available for free to read on-line from the Anthropological Studies Center of Sonoma State University. You can find it at web.sonoma.edu/asc/projects/warmspringsindex.html. (It’s also linked from the official Lake Sonoma website at spn.usace.army.mil/Missions/Recreation/Lake-Sonoma/ but the link has a period instead of a colon—fix that in the URL and it will take you straight to the website.) Especially fascinating are the profiles of Pomo and settler families who lived in the area, but there is also an abundance of material on natural features and details of life in the early days.
