The highlight of our week was our mini weekend getaway! We drove up north to….Santa Rosa!! Okay… Santa Rosa (which is in Sonoma Valley a.k.a. Wine Country) wasn’t the most exciting place to visit…especially since we both don’t drink. We also went during a heat wave, so it was unbearably hot. Even though the destination was bland, in our opinion, we still had a very relaxing time together. It was refreshing to spend some quality time together and it was nice to just stay in a hotel and be away from home.
Our hotel was a 10 minute walk away from a nearby Costco. The first night, we walked over to the Costco food court and got pizza and hotdogs for dinner! During our walk we commented on the fact that we basically just drove 7 hours all the way up north only to eat Costco pizza. But it was cheap, and very delicious! How can you ever go wrong with Costco pizza!? We love the fact that we vacation the same. No pressure to eat all the “local” foods and no pressure to see everything there is to see. We also usually take naps during the middle of the day, which we did the next day. There’s just something about a nap on vacation that makes it so relaxing.
The two main highlights from our trip were 1) visiting this one neighborhood in Sebastopol (a nearby city) that is lined with junk art and 2) our Safari West tour! It was so cool to see the junk art. Basically, the artists create sculptures using different pieces of junk! Like a flashlight for a nose, an old mailbox for a body, wheels for feet, etc. It’s so fun to look at and it’s even more fun to try to figure out the different objects used to create the sculpture! And then there was our Safari West tour. This was our favorite activity of the weekend. Neither of us have ever been on any kind of “safari” tour, so we were both really excited for this! We got to see rhinos, zebras, a bunch of different kinds of antelope, and giraffes! The giraffes were standing just an arm’s reach away from us! But we couldn’t pet them.
Our favorite part of the trip wasn’t so much the activities, but the time spent together in the car– just driving, eating junk food, and listening to crime podcasts. On our drive home, we got to watch the sky change colors as the sun set and it was absolutely beautiful. We passed by a hippie-looking couple, parked on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere and sitting on top of their colorful hippie bus, taking in the view of the sun going down behind the mountains. And it was just one of those blissful scenes that perfectly capped off our trip.
jake & cindy 