The town of Sonoma was very busy yesterday, a warm sunny day even in San Francisco that got quite hot by the time we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and rolled through Marin County and on into wine country. The fountain in Sonoma is being worked on, but the town square was filled with parties and picnics and the stores overlooking the square were filled with shoppers and vacationers. The wineries we went to were busy, but the Buena Vista Winery down in the Carneros area was a nice find, shaded and hidden at the end of the road with serious-looking stone buildings and a lively tasting room. The ground, where it is not covered with irrigated vines, is yellower and drier than I had expected for this early in the summer. Some of the cows we saw from the highway were beautiful–some almost all black, some almost all white, some with brown and grey splotches. Coastal California cows are a fascinating type of herd to look at because of those colors mixing with the yellow grass background, and because they crowd together on terraces in close formation.