Every February, I go a little crazy. By then, we've been through months of drizzly weather and unrelenting darkness that could be described as "dementors breeding" or "the armies of Mordor assembling". The curse of living in the Pacific Northwest is similar to that of Narnia. It's always winter, and never Christmas.
Actual picture of my house last winter. Father Christmas is nowhere in sight.
Normally, this is the time of year where I demand to go to Hawaii and spend the ensuing weeks stalking TripAdvisor reviews of resorts until I get my Alaska Airlines companion ticket code in March. By then, work is too busy so we book a trip to Hawaii for December and I spend the ensuing nine months sending Vance the same twenty pictures of beaches over and over again. He loves it.
This is not Sonoma, but it's one of my favorite pictures to text Vance.
Last year, though, I got clever. I booked a weekend trip for early March and snuck in a couple days of sunshine before busy my season hit, in Sonoma, California.
This was a weird time to travel. It was the first weekend of March, and we were just starting to see a news cycle dominated by COVID. Back then, we thought we'd be protected by hand sanitizer, our young immune systems, and the fact that we hadn't recently travelled out of the country. So after consulting with my cousin's girlfriend who is in medical school and a very reliable medical resource (and also talking to my neighbor who is a pathologist and an actual doctor), we hopped on a plane and flew the 1.5 hours to Santa Rosa Airport.
I have a philosophy that all good vacations start at the airport. A few years ago, I flew first class to go to a conference, and since then I've had a hard time getting back in the back of the plane. I love all the fun perks like speedy security lines and airport lounges and real cloth napkins with my tablespoon of slightly warmed mixed nuts. I now have a credit card which gave me free TSA Pre-Check and airport lounge access, so all of my trips are at least a little bit fancy. On longer flights, we've started paying extra for Premium Economy or First Class seats, and we end up significantly less grumpy when we arrive at our destination. Since this flight was only a quick hop, we didn't bother, but we did proudly pass through security with our shoes on.
Upon landing, we picked up our rental car directly from the airport. I used Hotwire to book the car because I had absolutely no opinion on what car rental agency we used. Hotwire lets you book something based on price, and you don't see which agency you've booked from until after you paid. It's got a fun gambling aspect, and it's also usually a money saver.
Sonoma is about thirty minutes from the airport in Santa Rosa, and it's a pretty rural area so the drive was relaxing. We stayed at The Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa, which I picked based on the fact that it had a spa with natural mineral springs, a shuttle into town, and rooms with a fireplace. If I could redo the trip, I would have picked a hotel in the actual downtown area of Sonoma. There were a lot of cute boutique hotels within walking distance of everything, whereas the Fairmont was farther out and you had to drive if you wanted to go anywhere. I'm also a snob and I wasn't particularly impressed by the rooms or hotel itself.
We commiserated our subpar hotel location at the spa. The mineral pools were a fun novelty, but they weren't as hot and bubbling as I pictured. I felt like I had been lied to by every movie in my childhood that featured a hot spring. There was a very nice sauna and a steam room and some outdoor seating. It was only in the sixties, but the sun was out and it was just barely warm enough for us to lay out in our swimsuits for a bit, which was the whole point of the trip. I got a body scrub as a treatment. My spa therapist told me that if I got body scrubs regularly, I wouldn't get cancer. I promptly disregarded this advice, since it wasn't given to me by a trusted health professional like my cousin's girlfriend in medical school.
I learned two important lessons that night at dinner. The first lesson was to always say yes to beets. They were in season, and every restaurant we went to over the course of our trip had beets on the menu. They were so delicious, like eating a bowl of tangy dirt mixed with sugar. All of the vegetables we ate on our trip were amazing. I'm not sure if this is because we were in the middle of farm country or because Californians value higher food quality, but you'll be doing yourself a big solid if you eat every veggie in sight. Avocado was also spectacular, as were the salad greens.
It's a tower of beets!
The second lesson was to order the wine pairings. There are so many amazing wines in Sonoma and the restaurants do a great job of matching them to the food. We had a lemon tart for dessert, paired with a very sweet wine. This was the meal that pushed me down a slippery slope of saying pretentious wine things like, "the undernotes of sweet peach perfectly complements the sour citrus flavor in this tart." Thanks to this meal, I will be very obnoxious at all future dinner parties.
This first day was the perfect springboard for the rest of our trip! We spent the next two days seeing the best the region had to offer in a whirlwind of adventure. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the trip, and for my Bachelor recap coming tomorrow night!
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