Year: 2019

How to Get a French Laundry Reservation (and Meal Review)

The French Laundry in Yountville, CA, is a three-Michelin-starred restaurant that is notoriously hard to get a reservation for. Because we love food and love experiencing travel destinations via food, we knew we had to at least try to get a French Laundry reservation on our recent trip to check out Sonoma and Napa Valley wineries.

We ended up being successful, so we wanted to share our tips for landing a coveted spot, as well as a general review of the meal and experience.

The hype around getting reservations for The French Laundry is pretty intense. But we found that if you understand the process, can plan far in advance, and are somewhat flexible in your dining date and time, a reservation is fairly easily attainable.

As with all posts on this site, the following is based on our visit date in early 2019. The booking process is liable to change.

Read more

5 of Our Favorite Napa and Sonoma Wineries to Visit

In a previous article, we broke down the differences between Napa and Sonoma to give broad views on these two rather unique winemaking regions.

In it, we loosely mentioned some of the vineyards we checked out during our first trip to the area, but spent most of the article speaking in generalities about the regions as a whole.

Today, we wanted to dive into the Napa Valley wineries and Sonoma wineries themselves, and highlight a few that stood out to us as being must visits!

Read more

Tips to Improve Page Speed Insights Scores with a GeneratePress Theme

If you’re like me, you’re probably obsessive about your site speed. It doesn’t matter the service, I want to do whatever I can to get the best possible scores, load times, and ratings- even if some don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Out of all of the services that are out there, one that is the holy grail is Google’s Page Speed Insights (PSI) as it is one of the few tools provided by the search giant that gives clues on how website owners can improve. (Plus non-Google tools like WebpageTest at GTMetrix to round out further analyses.)

Naturally, we latched on to it and made it our quest to top out in the highest category on our sites.

Unfortunately, our site on our old theme (Elegant Themes) only took us so far, and we knew it was time to upgrade. We switched to GeneratePress, made some customizations, and both our desktop and mobile scores jumped (with mobile scores in the high 80s and desktop flirting with 100 most days).

Today, I wanted to share the techniques I used to make this happen as it won’t come out of the box.

Note: Before we begin it is worth pointing out that at the end of the day site speed is king. Google PSI scores are mainly a suggestion. Although we’re in the weeds with it you can have a fast site without a high score, and no one is really certain if a high score provides an SEO benefit like a fast site. Our interest in this is purely because we can optimize it over a more practical reason. This could change in the future and we’ll update accordingly.

Read more

16 of The Best Places to Visit on a Florida Road Trip

The following is a guest post from This is My South.

Florida is a great destination when it comes to road trips. There are unique things to see in every corner of the state and it’s easy to traverse by both major highways and backroads. It has an abundance of natural springs just begging you to come take a dip and maybe even spot a manatee!

No matter which part of the state you’re interested in tackling, you’re sure to find something to see. Rent a car, pack your bags, and book your hotel for the ultimate Florida road trip.

Read more