Bad Days

(Note: I formatted this to let the pictures follow the text. On wider screens, it might come up a little wacky.)

Whenever I have a bad day, my first instinct is to get away. When I was in high school, I used to drive out towards Redding. First, I'd stop at the outlets in Anderson, then I would just drive around Redding until it got dark and would drive back home. Once I moved into Chico, I would drive on the outskirts of towns and until I stopped recognizing where I was.

This morning everything I had been dealing with just sort of came up all at once. I felt that urge to get in my car and drive. Colin wanted to come along, which, was something new for me. Normally, these drives were a solo thing for me. But there's something about Colin that makes me want to share things like that with him. I guess that's a sign of true love, eh?







After getting some internet advice on neat places to drive around Sacramento I headed up Freeport Blvd. toward the Delta.


First, I came along a bowling alley, which of course seemed like a great way to start this day adventure.  We bowled two games. The first game I did horribly on. But then the second game came along and I seemed to have warmed up. One of my favorite things about Bowling Alleys is those stinky shoes. Yes, the horrible foot-disease ridden shoes. I think it's all part of the experience.
 

After the bowling alley we continued to drive towards the Delta. But first, we came along a field of wildflowers. It was always my dream as a kid to get married in a field of wildflowers. But I apparently forgot that with flowers comes bees. Bees and I are not such good friends. Luckily, we kept our distance from each other today.



We got back on the road and continued along. One of my favorite things about California is all the small towns you'll run into. We weren't even that far out of the city, and you start finding these tiny towns with just a market or two. We came into a town that I believe was called Courtland. Thanks to the internet, I found that Courtland is "a rural community of fewer than seven hundred souls, named for Courtland Sims whose daddy owned this land and built a steamboat landing on it in 1860. Today, commercial traffic no longer steams through this meandering stretch of the Sacramento River but is routed through the Sacramento Deep Water Ship Channel several miles to the west."

The only thing left there seems to be a Pear Fair that happens in July. We found an abandoned building that was insanely gorgeous. After nosing around, we figured out it looked as if there was a bank inside it at one point, and maybe a museum before that? It was gorgeous, the architecture amazed me.


Not too far away was this Masonic Hall. Empty and neglected, I still found it beautiful. I wish I could renovate and live in it. It was for sale strangely. I wish I had funds to buy it.








We finished off the day by eating the Vegan Blueberry & Sprinkle donuts we had gotten from Sugar Plum Cafe. We found a nice spot that was on a turnout off of 160. The donuts were delicious.