Lifestyle · Travel & Experiences
The Drive to Chateau St. Jean
A video of the road to Chateau St. Jean, and what it means to leave the desk before the work is finished.
Eraina Ferguson · Oct 12, 2026 · 2 min read
I posted a video of myself heading to Chateau St. Jean. Nothing dramatic happened in it. The road moved, the vines moved past it, and that was the whole clip.
But it is the kind of moment I notice more now than I used to. The part of building something that nobody puts on a slide is the leaving. Not the leaving of a job or a city — the smaller leaving, the one where you close the laptop while the list is still open and get in the car anyway.
The road is the part you remember
Wine country has a way of stretching time. You pass the same rows of vines so many times they start to feel like a rhythm rather than scenery, and somewhere in that rhythm the thinking changes shape.
I did not go to Chateau St. Jean looking for an answer to anything. I went because I wanted to be somewhere that was not a screen for a few hours, and because the drive itself is a decent excuse to be unreachable on purpose.
Leaving the desk with the list still open
The hardest part of protecting a personal life while you are building something is that the work is never finished. There is always one more thing that would be reasonable to do instead of going.
So the decision stops being about whether the work is done and starts being about whether you trust yourself to come back. That is a smaller and more honest question, and it is the one I keep having to answer.
What a drive is actually for
I am not going to pretend a wine country afternoon solved anything. It did not. The list was still open when I got back, and the work was waiting in the same condition I left it.
What changed was me. A few hours of sunlight and vines and a glass of something gave me enough distance to see which items on the list actually mattered, and which ones I was only holding because they were there.
