Could This Get Any More Northern California?

Sunday's Gravenstein Apple Festival in Sebastopol was just the right size. The Great 5.7 Head allowed the Pregnancy Card to be played so the Plotniks got a good parking place. There was a country singer with a deep Johnny Cash bass voice on the bandstand. Old apple picking engines put-puttered away behind a display picket fence while old men in railroad caps and gray stubbles sat in chairs, drinking lemonade, holding screw drivers to tinker with the engines and keep them going. If you broke a balloon (small) with any of four darts you could win a bag of Gravenstein apples. You could play with a twenty pound rabbit or ride a llama in the petting zoo. The bratwurst with sauerkraut, onions and Secret Yellow Mustard was delicious.

Before the Apple Festival, Plot, Duck, PD and 5.7 stopped at the notoriously and ridiculously fantastic Wild Flour Bakery in Freestone, just up the road from the wedding. (Thanks again to famed authoress Nguyen Steinbeck Tyrone Rodriguez for turning us on to this place.) They bought fougasse, filled with gruyere, gouda and jack cheese, and they bought sticky buns, big enough for four people and two hundred napkins, and they bought Egyptian sweet bread, with ginger in the crust, and then they went out into the courtyard and ate of their bounty. The wind and sun were chatoyant. Heh heh. Aromas of whole grains and nutritious yeasts wafted from the bakery. A bicyclist couple in blue slicks paused in their day's ride from Healdsburg (25 miles each way), to sit on a bakery bench and re-carb. Convoys of American classic cars, tricked out and polished, passed the bakery heading North.

5.7 Head turned to PunkyDunky and said: "This can't get any more Northern California, can it?"

Eventually Plotnik followed one of those cars through the woods, which is how they found the Apple Festival. But what about the wedding? What wedding? Tune in tomorrow.