California Love

Hello! I know everyone that is subscribed to this blog is really used to hearing Jill's voice in their heads as they read it, seeing as how she was so amazing at updating while she was in Australia! You've got Danni this time. I've been told by my sister to 'update the blog', and seeing as how I'm really really terrible at doing so when I'm actually traveling, I guess it is my turn.

I'm nowhere as exciting as Australia, but I AM in LOVELY Northern California this week. I'm staying with my friend Marcia at her Auntie's house in Healdsburg (about 2 hours north of SF), and it is a fantastic place. First off, its wine country. WINE COUNTRY. And it's a super cute town. And there are many fabulous restaurants. Truffle fries, people. TRUFFLE FRIES.

The only really annoying thing about getting here was the fact that instead of 2 hours from SF, it was about 4.5 due to rush hour traffic. We were sitting in the car around 7 pm (landed at 3), Marce carsick and on the verge of biting me due to low blood sugar and not eating since 11:30 am, and decided to ditch off the freeway and go get some food. In Marcia's words "I am just going to tell the waitress to bring me the first easy thing to put in my mouth, and THEN bring me a menu".
We googled "restaurants in Petaluma" and picked the first one, which was the amazing Lagunitas Brewery (neither of us knew anything about it). This was the best accidental restaurant choice ever. Beer was great (especially the Farmhouse Sour!) and so was the food. Marce had a 10" hot dog that sent us into 12 year old boy level giggles at the waiter's comments when he set it down in front of us.

The next morning we woke up, threw on clothes and headed out to the farmer's market. As we were heading back to the car around 10 am we stopped in at a tasting room to ask about the bottle of Christopher label wine in the window, for Marcia's bf, and ended up having Mike, the manager of the tasting room, ply us with wine for the next hour. Oh 10am accidental wine tastings! 10 glasses of wine and 2 100$ bottles of wine purchases later (Umm... apparently 15% off sounds a lot like 50% off to Marce when she has had 10 glasses of wine) we were ready to finally get ready for the day!

We don't really have a lot of plans for the rest of the week except for hopefully getting a tan amidst the bursts of rain we've been having, hot tubbing every night, wine and music in the park tonight(!), and continuing to cook delicious but simple meals out of our farmer's market goodness. And I'm even managing to get some work done, which is made easier by the fact that I'm sitting in a backyard that looks like this while I do so:

Oh, and of course I'll need to have more truffle fries.