Skipping Town

Andrew’s sister, Katherine, and her boyfriend, Patrick, visited us from Florida this weekend, and we did our best to show them the best NorCal has to offer. When Katherine visited us a couple of years ago, it rained the entire time she was here—it was the most rain we’d ever seen before, or have seen since. Fortunately, the weather cooperated this time, refraining from both rain and the 100s. Friday, we took a day trip to Tahoe, where we all swam in the lake and had a picnic lunch on the sand. The afternoon grew windy, and there were kite surfers in the water, some of them becoming airborne for several seconds at a time. Before heading down the mountain we showed Katherine and Patrick around the Cal Neva. Andrew and I provided our usual contribution to its upkeep and bankruptcy proceedings via the Lucky Duck, Triple 7s, and Wheel of Fortune quarter slots, while Patrick had some ridiculously good luck, at one point winning sixty quarters with his first spin. Belly in Tahoe Katherine and...

This weekend, Andrew and I headed north to Mendocino County, home of our favorite winery, Husch Vineyards. We’re members of the winery (every six months we get a shipment of six wines), and each summer they have a picnic at the vineyard. We had a great time last year and so, Friday night, we made the three-hour drive again. We arrived in Ukiah Friday night, just in time for dinner at the Ukiah Brewing Company, a great little place right on the main street of this very small town. We’ve had dinner here every time we’ve been in Ukiah; we like not only the food (mostly locally grown and organic) but also the off-the-beaten-path blend of aging hippies and hipsters who somehow find a way to make a living in the area. We didn’t stay to hear the live music—I was having an evening of feeling alien to my own body; both my back and my belly had minds of their own that night, and I’d spent the entire drive in a state of supreme discomfort. We retreated to our room at the Days Inn (the cutest Days...

I can’t complain about the redwoods. Wandering through a redwood forest is one of my favorite things to do here in California, and the two areas we’ve explored so far—the Hendy Woods and Muir Woods—have been amazing. There’s something particularly relaxing and peaceful about wandering through trees that have been around for centuries, their stick-straight trunks careening skyward, shading the paths with the needles that splay from their very tops.