Parks and Recreation

One thing about Napa that I've noticed is that there are not enough parks. Many of the places I've lived - like Richmond, VA or Bellevue, WA - take pride in their public spaces and provide ample and beautiful walking trails, gardens, and other park space. Napa - not so much. If you want to take a simple stroll, you'd either have to do it downtown on the riverfront (which currently has that closed-off, warning-bees sign problem) or pay to do it on winery grounds. It's a shame that with all this beautiful weather, it's left us searching for a place to enjoy it.
We did discover one downtown park worth strolling - Fuller Park. It seemed to have a handful of sleeping hobos in it at midday on a weekday for some reason, so it may get dicey after dark (?) Here is a shot of the picnic area:

Anyway, for shame, city of Napa! Surely you're making enough in tax revenue to designate and design some public park lands!

A revered tourist destination in Napa Valley - with a location in St. Helena and another next to Oxbow Market in the city of Napa - is Taylor's Refresher. Set up to look like an old-fashioned drive-in burger stand, it does have the usual burgers (using Niman's beef) but also an Ahi tuna burger, sweet potato fries, and shakes in flavors like espresso and white pistachio. We tried the onion rings (good!) and the cheeseburger (fine but not that much of an improvement from the much cheaper In-N-Out cheeseburger.) Again, this is a fun place to bring people from out of town - although they might gasp at the prices ($4 for onion rings, $7 for a cheeseburger) but it bustles and at least it's a good place to get a quickish bite. (It took us fifteen minutes to get our order.)