Scenes from the (Valentine) Weekend

It was a funny mish-mash of seasons over the weekend: signs of spring seemed to burst forth from every tree as we drove up into the mountains on Sunday to play in the snow. Our activities were equally all over the place, which made for a full, fun, holiday weekend. Some highlights…

After breaking into their loot from the Valentine’s celebration at school (a pretty fantastic end to Skyler’s first week!), the kids and I played in the yard and admired all the bees that had suddenly arrived, and then rode our bikes through the arboretum to dinner.

On Saturday we biked out to the UC Davis Raptor Center, one of the many campus facilities holding open houses for Biodiversity Day. Other highlights were the Fish & Wildlife displays in the Bohart Entymology Building and the new blooms at the Mondavi Good Life Gardens—where we stopped for lunch. We took turns driving the “family van.”

After Skyler’s nap, we met some friends for happy hour at the Ruhstaller Tap Room in Dixon—at their hops farm. The sheep were a big hit!

Aron and the kids made breakfast on Sunday—Valentine’s day—and then we made a last-minute decision to drive to Lake Tahoe and check out the village at Squaw and drive around the lake.

It had been years since I’d been to Squaw (and usually we ski out of the resort, not the village), so it looked completely new to me. We had pizza for lunch, met all the dogs, and let Hudson jump on trampolines.

The water level at the lake is still low, but it was beautiful seeing some of the shores covered in snow—with snowshoers and cross-country skiiers making their way around.

After lots of stops to play and even some peeks at open houses to imagine what it would be like to have a cabin in Tahoe, we had a romantic Valentine dinner at Baja Fresh across from Heavenly, in South Lake, and let the kids fall asleep in the car. After all, we’d never gotten them out of their pajamas!

Aron and I celebrated Valentine’s day on Monday, instead. We spent the morning biking around town with the kids, and then snuck off for massages, followed by dinner at Grange, in the beautiful Citizen hotel, in Sacramento—where they let us sneak a peek at the view of the city from the Governor’s room on the 14th floor.