Place to place

I'm sitting at my cousin JoAnn's house in Grass Valley, watching the sun come up. Well, not actually watching because that's bad for your eyes, but watching the light change and shift and gradually take over from the bluish glow that greeted me when I woke up.

I've thus far pretty successfully stayed on some semblance of east coast time, getting up around 6 and going to bed around 10. Hopefully I can adjust back pretty quickly when we return. I have a few days.

Yesterday we drove up into the hills to visit another one of my cousins, who lives up here in the Sierra foothills. It's really beautiful, and we spent part of the day just hanging out, then headed into two local towns.

For some reason, I had purposely not looked into these places at all. One can either say that I was allowing myself to experience them completely on my own terms, unfettered by others' opinions. Or you could say I was too lazy to do the research. Either way, even though I suspected that they might be old mining towns, since this is gold and silver mining countries, I was struck by how well preserved Nevada City was and what a wide variety of places you could buy really nice things that you don't need.

You've probably all been in these stores- accessories and home furnishings. The number of unusual cookbooks and bits of kitchenware and barware and decorative items, purportedly functional or not, available is pretty remarkable, as you can guess from my choosing to remark on it here. A lot of it was hippyish and new agey, but with nice clothes and lots of places to eat. All with what appears to be original buildings from back in the gold rush days.

We spent most of the afternoon there, then went to Grass Valley, which is not nearly as cute but is also stuffed with shops and restaurants. I was no chain places, including no chain hotels. Ronnie and I were wondering where all the visitors come from, because they are clearly tourist-oriented.

I can take a certain amount of the clothing/home furnishing shopping, but at this point I (and Celia) opted to check out the kitchen store across the street from the boutique. This was an unexpected and kind of mind boggling experience. Tess' Kitchen Shop is simply the best kitchen shop I've ever seen. Nothing else even comes close.

We stayed in there until it was closed, had dinner, came home and watched Guardians of the Galaxy and then had a nice long sleep.

Since then, I've been back to Sacramento and now on to San Francisco, where I now sit. A long, fun, disorienting day. Time for some good seafood and then home in the morning.