Petaluma and a Small High School Reunion

After dropping off my parents at the airport at 5am on Saturday, we drove into San Fran and spent the morning wondering around Golden Gate Park. The park is over 3 miles long and just under half a mile wide, and is 20% larger than Central Park. According to Wikipedia, this is the third most visited city park in the US, after Chicago's Lincoln Park and New York's Central Park. There are so many things to do in this park, its easy to see why its so popular.

I think we walked about 9 miles exploring the park that morning. We headed back into Marin County around lunch time to pick up our trailer and check out of the RV park. One of Skyler's classmates from high school, Cara Hill (now Larimer), had contacted us a while back through Facebook, welcoming us to come stay with her and her husband Nathan in their town of Petaluma. Petaluma is about 40 miles from San Fran, just up highway 101, and lies at the southern end of Sonoma County, the sister wine county to Napa Valley.

We found a great parking spot right by their house, just minutes from historic downtown. Cara had prepared an amazing dinner for us, and the four of us enjoyed the three course meal while catching up on what's been going on since we last saw each other in college.

1st course: homegrown lettuce, strawberries and home-made goat cheese fritters! 

2nd course: Sausage, onion, tomato and pepper over fusilli

3rd course: home-made strawberry pie! Num!

Sunday morning, Nathan and Cara took us to their favorite breakfast spot in Sonoma County, the Fremont Diner. The diner is super unimposing, and sits on the side of the road, where you would never notice it when driving by. Its probably a word of mouth kind of place. BUT, once you've been there, you're hooked. Its set in a retro style, with a really adorable interior. The food wasn't half bad either... (no, actually it was horribly delicious, in a lots of butter kind of way).

Fremont Diner in Sonoma County

My breakfast...super num!

Breakfast at the Fremont Diner

After breakfast Cara suggested we take a free tour of a local sustainable agriculture and pastured meat farm, the Tara Firma Farm. That was a very interesting tour! We learned all about raising baby chicks, how to house chickens, when and why to move cows around on pasture land, gardening tips, and lots of other neat info. Leaving the farm, Sky and I were dreaming about buying up some local land of our own and doing something similar.

A walking tour of the farm

How to properly raise chickens!

Oh, to the hard life of a farm pig!

To continue our tour of Petaluma, Cara drove us to the historic downtown where we wondered around the cute local shops. Nathan stayed back to work on editing his latest photo shoot. He is a talented photographer for the Petaluma and Sonoma County area, check out his website here. Before eating some yummy pizza, we stopped by the Seed Bank, where you can find over 1,200 varieties of heirloom seeds! This store is located in an old bank, which is neat given its name.

Petaluma Historic Downtown

The Seed Bank

Monday was a work day for most folks, so we had the day to ourselves. We went hiking around the Putnam Regional Park, just outside of Petaluma, and saw about twenty deer around the property.

It was really nice to catch up with someone we hadn't seen in so long, and in such gorgeous surroundings.

To see more pics of Petaluma, click here.

Happy catching up!

M.