Chris Smith: The surprise, VIP guests at the reborn Paradise Ridge Winery

The triumphant, up-from-the-ashes reopening celebration at Paradise Ridge Winery was well under way when a pair of tentative latecomers appeared at the door.

Dana Condolora and her husband, Bob Dennis, were visiting from near Seattle. A little self-conscious about their casual attire, they had no earthly idea the Byck family was just then hosting a reception to christen the splendid new tasting and event space that replaces the one lost to the Tubbs fire.

The couple was welcomed in, handed flutes of bubbly. Once the Bycks discovered Dana and Bob’s connection to the winery on Fountaingrove hill and to the ‘17 firestorm, they embraced the pair like long-lost kin.

HHHHHH

ON OCT. 8, 2017, the Washingtonians were doing the Wine Country thing with Bob’s parents, who’d traveled to Sonoma County from the East Coast.

Dana, a nurse in Seattle, had never been here before. Her husband, a health data analyst, had visited a few times while living for a time in the East Bay.

On that 2017 trip, they were loving Sonoma County.

“I remember thinking how windy and hot it was,” Dana said, favorably. She’d lived in San Fernando Valley, so the blustery fall weather felt familiar.

That second Sunday of October ‘17, the visitors booked rooms at the Fountaingrove Inn. As Dana and Bob recall, it was about 4 p.m. when they took the short drive uphill to Paradise Ridge.

As they walked into the tasting room, a staffer said the winery would close at 4:30 but, please, come on in and try some wines.

Bob, who’s 51, and Dana, 57, are pretty sure they were the last visitors to step in on what turned out to be the last night of the former home of Paradise Ridge Winery.

The couple said good-bye that afternoon two years ago and returned to the Fountaingrove Inn. They and Bob’s folks drove downtown for dinner. Afterward, back at the hotel, Bob’s dad suggested that the four of them walk down to the Equus bar and restaurant.

But Dana was ready to turn in. She told her father-in-law, “Let’s go tomorrow. It’ll still be there.”

So she thought.

HHHHHH

AS A NURSE aware of the presence just down Mendocino Avenue of a Kaiser Permanente medical center, Dana was surprised by the volume of sirens she heard very early the Monday morning of Monday, Oct. 9.

She recalls, “I thought, ‘Man, they really have a busy ER.’”

She and Bob shot awake in their Fountaingrove Inn room with the blaring of the hotel’s alarm.

“When we opened the door,” Bob remembers, “there was smoke in the hallway. And there were Glo Sticks.”

It would later occur to him to wonder why, if hotel staffers had time to place navigational Glo Sticks down the hallways, they weren’t also banging on doors or shouting for guests to get out.

He and family learned quickly that fire was bearing down on the hotel. They had to flee.

“We had our pajamas on,” Dana said. She and Bob grabbed a little of what they’d brought into the room but left most.

“We just ran out,” she said.

HHHHHH

ONCE ALL FOUR members of their party were in the rental car, they joined the grand exodus from farther up Fountaingrove. Through the terror and uncertainty, Dana was astounded by how orderly and patient all the evacuating drivers were.

Her family found its way south to the new Oxford Suites hotel just off Highway 101 in Rohnert Park. Dana marveled that though the rooms were taken, the staff was welcoming everyone in and getting them set up in the lobby with blankets and pillows.

“They served us all a free breakfast,” she said. “Everybody just worked together.”

Dana did what she could did to check in with and comfort fellow evacuees. As a nurse she wanted to venture forth and go to work as a disaster volunteer.

But her mother-in-law was desperate to get back home to the East Coast. So they all four returned to the rental car and drove back to the airport in San Francisco.

Said Dana, “It was really hard to leave.”

HHHHHH

SINCE THEN, she and Bob have for more than two years followed online the saga of our recovery from the Tubbs fire and now the Kincade fire.

The couple agreed recently that enough time had passed and they wanted to come back and check on Sonoma County. After checking into a Petaluma hotel a week ago they drove to Santa Rosa and to the forlorn, mostly bare, charred spot that had been the Fountaingrove Inn.

“It gives you chills,” Dana said. Gazing through the chain-link fence, she fought an urge to go to where her room and her in-laws’ room had been, and dig.

Dana’s mother-in-law fled without some valuables, and Dana would like to have some of the possessions she left behind. She tempers her sadness with the knowledge that many people lost everything to the Tubbs fire, and many their lives.

The heart-wrenching remains of the Journeys End mobile home was right there for the visitors to behold. But Bob and Dana resisted driving west to Coffey Park.

“We did not want to intrude,” Dana said.

Just as she and Bob had done 26 months earlier, they set out for Paradise Ridge Winery fairly late on a Sunday evening. They’d read that the Bycks had rebuilt and the knew from all the parked cars that something was going on at the hillside winery, but they didn’t know about the by-invitation reopening celebration.

What a contrast the new Paradise Ridge structure was to the stark destruction where the Fountaingrove Inn, Journeys End and the Hilton Hotel had been.

“The building is beautiful,” Dana said. “We’re really happy for them. It’s like they didn’t skip a beat.”

Hearing of the presence of a couple that had been there the day of the Tubbs fire, members of the Byck family opened their arms to Bob and Dana.

“We’re so happy you came back!” Sonia Byck-Barwick told the return visitors. “This is huge that you’re supporting us.”

As the couple left, they and the Bycks vowed that they will meet again.

Dana and Bob say that by now, they’re feeling a part of this place. It made them happy to see the rebirth of Paradise Ridge and to learn of the rebuilding that’s happening at Coffey Park and in Fountaingrove, Larkfield-Wikiup and elsewhere.

But even a quick trip back showed them that our recovery has a long way to go.

“There’s a lot of healing going on,” said Dana, the nurse. “And there’s still so much that needs to heal. Much more than I thought.”

You can contact Chris Smith at 707 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.