My husband and I are leaving today for a brief trip down to California for a winetasting trip in the Sonoma area. We are looking forward to spending time with a good friend and using her home in Windsor as our base of operations for visiting wineries in Healdsburg, Sonoma and whatever crops up in between. Although we’re pretty familiar with the area and have a few wineries on our list that are must-sees, we always look forward to trying some new (at least to us) places. The same goes with restaurants: we’ll no doubt stop at our favorite specialty food/grocery store in Healdsburg for some of their terrific sandwiches as a mid-day break, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for a range of new eateries, from elegant to quick and easy, to try. Generally, the drive is a pretty easy six-hour jaunt down I-5 and then west ’til we hit vineyards. However, the weather around here lately has been pretty soggy and definitely cool. That makes a lot of people happy: skiers at Mt. Ashland and Mt. Shasta are delighted to have fresh snow for spring break and an extended season, and fishermen and farmers and ranchers are pleased that the snowpack is getting a late-season boost to help with stream levels this summer. For those of us traveling over the Siskiyou Mountains, however, it means we’re watching the forecasts and traffic cameras pretty closely. Here’s where the latest technology is so helpful to travelers: we can go online and pull up weather reports and live shots of multiple points on our route (complete with air and pavement temps). We can find out before we even leave home if we’ll have to put on chains or expect delays due to snow or ice and see for ourselves how traffic is moving and how quickly the snow is piling up. Of course, if we had a smartphone, we’d be even more tuned in and could “see” what was going on just five miles ahead of us. With Harry retiring soon and more road trips in our future, I have a feeling that issue will soon be rectified. I hope your travels this coming week are smooth, and if you’ve got any favorite tools or websites you like to use to make your journeys easier, please share! — Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor