Zeno's Bar & Grill

We're just back from a trip to Gold Country in Northern California, where we pretty much did it all. Big Trees? Check. Trip 1800 feet into an active gold mine? Check. Stay overnight at a historic hotel where the bathrooms are down the hall and the saggy mattresses haven't been upgraded since 1849? Check. Panning for eensy weensy gold nuggets? Check.

Actually the gold nuggets were hilarious. You had to buy a bag of dirt that was guaranteed to have the nuggets somewhere in it. So then, you had to decide whether to go with the el cheapo thirteen dollar bag with "three grains" of gold (not actual grains, it's a unit of weight). Or for the family fun pack for $89.95. Yeah, 90 bucks for a bag of dirt just seemed...wrong. We did find our little bits of gold in the el cheapo bag, so that was plenty of fun and a bargain, all things considered.

And to top things off, we also got to make a quick stop in Napa, where the real gold was to be found--not just in the amazing hospitality of our friends Jon and Marcy, but also in the...um, 27 bottles of wine we bought during our personalized wine tour with Marcy. We actually had to bring the wine into our hotel to keep it from heating up in the sweltering July sun. Wonder what the housekeepers thought of that?

All in all, it was a really fun trip, but on the way home, we actually had time in the car to think about all the miscellaneous things that needed doing around the house, and the resulting page-long list has kept me busy ever since we got back. I'm not sure if it's a manic cycle or what, but I must admit I did find myself awake at four thirty in the morning, washing my slipcovers.

So, go to Gold Country--you just might find that you get so rested and revived that those nagging household chores start to seem surmountable again!

--Melanie

Labels: Gold, housework, Vacation