The Best Swimming Pool In Napa's Wine Country

Imagine you have little time for a getaway. Let's say, for example, you can spare one day and two nights. Let's say you make your way to the Carneros Inn in Napa, California.

You'd wake up here, to morning light and a newspaper in your mailbox.


Then you'd amble up the hill for breakfast, pausing to watch early sun over the valley.


Eat in the Hilltop Restaurant. When it's not too hot, you can sit outside and keep gazing at the view and the best swimming pool in Napa. On really hot days, however, you'll prefer to eat in here.

Either way, you're going to want a freshly-cooked, home-made, sugar-covered mini-doughnut. Those sugar crystals crack between your teeth, and the doughnut itself is what I can only call bouncy.

Then you can go back to your cottage. Don't bother with the extra charges for Vineyard Cottages. Garden is more than good enough. Or you might have come with friends, or family, and rented a house.

(Click to enlarge. Ask to be in the Knittel, or Crane, or Peck 'neighborhood.' They surround adorable little courtyards, with fountains. Away from the roads, but not too close to that pool and its banging gate. Registration won't promise, but no harm in asking)

Either way, right about now you're probably going to want to suit up and return to the pool.


Where, luckily, you can eat lunch. Nice people will bring you food on white plates. Many guests will also be drinking wine, even though it's only 11:30 in the morning. That's because it's Wine Country.

Luckily, they have pool umbrellas. Under which you may want to nap. Because, again, it's Wine Country.

Then you will want to exercise. Because it's Doughnut AND Wine Country.

Then, as a reward for exercising, you will take a walk. Out past one of the many fountains, down one of the many paths lined by fruit trees, up towards the spa.

Where you will notice, yet again, that everything looks most beautiful standing against the blue of a Northern California late summer sky. But you won't spend too much time pondering the ineffable, since in a few minutes, someone is going to bring you drinks of anti-oxidant tea and pat your jowls into cheerful submission.

After which, you will emerge, soothed, to see that there are still people in the pool at 5:30pm. The friendly pool guy will tell you this is one of the most active times, in the friendly pool. People return from vineyards, and retire to the water, to drink wine and laugh. Because this is Wine Country.


Then to dinner. You can go either to Farm, or to the Boon Fly Cafe. Farm is wonderful, because you can sit outside and eat from the bar menu and drink. But Mondays and Tuesdays Farm is closed for dinner. So you're gonna wind up here. Eating something like fried green tomatoes, or buffalo wings. And drinking something like, well, you know, wine.


And then night will fall.


And you'll wander all the way back to your cottage. The next day, you could go visit some vineyards. Or not. The pool is kind of salty, by the way, so you float with no effort whatsoever.

Images
me
Note that no compensation has been received for this post. Quite the opposite, in fact.