Skipping Town

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...

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...