Skipping Town

Lucia was a little social butterfly last week. Thursday, our friends Julie and baby Allison drove down from Auburn (near Roseville) to spend the afternoon with us. Allison is just five weeks older than Lucia, and Lucia had such a good time playing with her—they actually seemed to play together, rather than just side by side. We spent time at the playground and here at the apartment, and there was lots of giggling and passing toys back and forth and standing at the window, playing with toys on the windowsill. I met Julie in prenatal yoga—and it’s always been fun to see how the girls have grown over this past year-plus. Maybe someday they’ll be transcontinental pen pals. Saturday we spent the day with the Clarks in Napa, happily revisiting wine-country territory we thought we’d left behind. The grapevines are all gold and red right now, and the scenery in wine country is gorgeous—since we missed the inferno of the summer, we can look at the landscape, including the fully brown hills and ...

With our departure approaching fast, we loaded up the car this weekend for a whirlwind goodbye tour of some of our favorite places in California. We set out late Friday afternoon and drove up through Clear Lake, a down-at-the-heels community full of trailer parks, diners, RVs, and a huge, gorgeous lake, which always seems to us like a place you’d go if you were in the witness protection program—in the middle of nowhere, an easy place to disappear. Our destination was Ukiah, a small town we stumbled upon on one of our very first road trips three years ago. There isn’t much in Ukiah except a great restaurant, the Ukiah Brewing Company; a cute bakery; and a farmer’s market. But there’s something peaceful about the place, and School Street, the main shopping street, is full of cute shops. Dinner Friday night, breakfast at the bakery Saturday morning, and a stroll through the farmer’s market kicked off our weekend tour. Next stop, Saturday afternoon: a market in Boonville for sandwiches, an...