The Longest Day

We had one of the longest Saturdays on record this weekend, in the good sense. My company has a small apartment above our office in Healdsburg, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco in the heart of wine country, and any of us from the company can go spend time up there for free during the week or on weekends, we just need to reserve it in advance.

Eric and I headed up on Friday night for our weekend getaway in wine country and made it up in time for dinner at the local microbrewery, Bear Republic Brewing Company. We sat outdoors in that summer-evening-warm-but-cool temperature that pretty much never happens in the city. It was wonderful.

Saturday was the longest day. I think what made it feel so long was the clever combination of doing a lot of things and doing nothing at all. We started if off by sitting in the central square with coffee and pastries, reading our books while also watching a variety of dogs and small children investigate, sometimes to the point of immersion, the fountain in the center of the square (dogs ended up in the fountain more often than kids, but not by much).

We walked around town a bit, got a mediocre lunch, went to find the Russian River, found it, walked around in it, saw some ducks and watched some big fluffy yellow dogs playing in the water. The dogs were working pretty hard to lug all their heavy fur through the water to retrieve the large sticks being thrown for them and they started really slowing down, becoming increasingly reluctant to give the sticks back just to see them chucked once more out into the river for them to fetch.

All this and it was only 3pm!

We went back to the apartment to nap. I napped; Eric passed on the nap in favor of going out to pick up some beer and snacks, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, the engagement ring we'd looked at earlier that I had determined was too nice for me.

Post-nap we went out to explore some more, this time driving through the rolling hills of vines heavy with ripe grapes to Lake Sonoma. We wandered around there a bit, checking out the boat launch and watching people tubing around the lake. We debated the merits of tubing vs other water sports and concluded that it is only fun when you are too young to do anything better like waterski or wakeboard.

At a beautiful vista point above the lake, both of us balanced precariously on a large tree trunk to enjoy the view, Eric reiterated that he'd like to get married and this time he had the ring to prove it. I almost fell off the tree trunk. It is a very beautiful ring. So now we really really are getting married, assuming we can deal with doing the actual planning for it at some point soon.

And yet the day continued! We went back to town, walked around and found a place to eat some dinner, played hangman on our napkins with the crayons available to entertain children, and, finally, because we were on vacation, we rented a terrible horror movie to watch on the big screen tv at the apartment. It was truly horrible. We only watched part of it on fast forward.

I told you it was the longest day.