Right before returning to Edinburgh for my senior year of college (wow!) my brother and I, along with my friend from England, went on a short trip to Kenwood, a small town in Sonoma County. Kenwood looks the way I picture California in my head; rolling hills of yellow grass, warm sunshine, oak trees, and vineyards. It's lovely. My mom's friend has a sweet little house there and she very generously invited us to stay. We drove up on a Thursday afternoon and hit the inevitable Bay Area traffic, which was a bummer but only made it all the better to finally arrive at our destination.
A car-side photo.
We spent the first night hanging out, playing cards, making dinner, etc. Just relaxing, which was great. The next day my friend and I went wine tasting, which neither of us had done before. We went to VJB and Gloria Ferrer, both of which are really cool. It was a lot of fun, but for me reinforced the fact that I actually don't really like wine. I do prefer whites to reds, and champagne to all else.
Relaxing on the deck.
I found this in the bushes.
We hiked around and chilled at the house for the rest of the day, then set off the next day for home, hoping to stop at the Russian River on the way. We had googled where to go and found a "secret and secluded pool" somewhere off the highway, so we decided to stop there. Turns out it was a little too "secret and secluded" because we couldn't find it and only managed to get lost. We had made hot dogs to have by the river as a picnic, but after driving and driving we got too hungry and decided to forget the river. Instead we pulled off at the nearest town (Healdsburg it turns out) and ate our hot dogs in a parking lot. Not quite a river picnic, but they still tasted good! And we went to a cupcake cafe after lunch, which was so good it almost made up for the lack of river.
The cupcake place had written on this door all the areas their ingredients came from. Very cool and very local!
After lunch we got back on the road. We drove back to Oakland via San Francisco, driving over and stopping at the Golden Gate Bridge so my friend could get some photos. We decided to also go to House of Air, the trampoline park right near the bridge, which was awesome!
It was foggy and a little chilly, as usual.
I don't have any photos from this trip, but I have this one from our last trip to House of Air (the only trip on which I actually managed to flip).