Saturday in the Gold Country

Yesterday's wedding was wonderful -- outdoors on the top of a hill, with a stunning view and perfect weather. The site, the couple's new home, will be opening as a winery in 2010. For now the "winery" is a huge metal barn, which is where they held the dinner. They rolled up the door on the west side for a perfect view of the sunset.

The bride's parents are old friends. Dave Uggla, who graduated from Carleton College the year before me, is probably the only person in California whe remembers me without a beard. I met Joyce folkdancing at Stanford, and we shared an apartment for a couple of years before Dave moved in (and I moved in with Colleen). Joyce and their son Jordan are members of Tres Gique. Their daughter, Linea, is less than a year younger than our daughter chaoswolf.

 

We got lost getting there. Twice. Turns out that the big sign welcoming you to Fairplay, California is not on Fairplay Road but on Grizzly Flat. There's a house at the same address as the winery. Oops. I remarked at one point, after tempers had cooled a little, that the whole thing would probably have been highly enjoyable as someone else's LJ post.

In the morning after breakfast we decided to explore in that direction; I got thrown off by the fact that the directions we had from Google Maps, while accurate and suitable for coming from the motel (West on US50), were highly misleading when coming East from Placerville. We tried to go back from Fairplay by unwinding the directions, when I discovered that both Kat and Colleen had totally misunderstood my unwinding request, but in totally different ways. We ended up far off course and in bad temper; I'll get into that under the cut in case you want to skip it.

 

We were coming from Placerville because we went there for breakfast (or brunch). We were looking for someplace to have Hangtown Fry, and wound up at the Buttercup Pantry, which advertizes itself as the "Home of the Hangtown Fry". Never mind that they also advertize themselves as having opened about a century after that dish was invented, for a miner who ordered the most expensive items on the menu after striking it rich. He got oysters, eggs, and bacon. Yum. I don't think that smoked oysters are strictly authentic, but the total effect was definitely made of yum.

We'll be back at Buttercup this morning, though I'll probably try something else.

 

( River: reading maps and reading people )

I'm probably never going to get this "being human" thing right, am I?

Well, it was a good wedding, and we ended the day contented and safe. I'll take that any time.