The Nut Tree and Memory Lane

SHHH!! Against my doctor's orders, we drove out to California for spring break. But I had a couple of good reasons: 1. the kids got off school for a whole week, which doesn't usually happen 2. Rob's schedule actually aligned with them for once so that he could take off, and 3. when I asked my doctor, he gave me financial reasons not to go (which I'd pay attention to if he were my accountant, but if he can't give me good health reasons, then why do I care what he says?).
So we drove out halfway on Friday, stayed in Winnemucca, then drove the other half on Saturday.
My dad was out on business, but my mom drove up to Vacaville to meet us, which was a big nostalgia trip for me. When my grandparents were driving down from Portland, we would often drive up to Vacaville to meet them at The Nut Tree and have breakfast there. It was a big restaurant with groovalicious yellow and orange vinyl chairs and two aviaries in the dining room and exciting things on the walls like a dollhouse of those weird little troll dolls with the hair that sticks up strait (I realize that these things don't really explain the allure of the experience, and that they don't even hang together very well, but they were the memories that really stood out as a child). There was a tiny airport on the premises with a small airplane to climb on; an upscale toystore; big huge sugar cookies decorated in diverse manners; a little train to ride on, and so on.
I remember meeting up with the grandparents in the parking lot in a pre-cell phone age and they always had a tupperware on the front seat of their Chevrolet Impala with grandma's applesauce brownies. I was amazed that after their trip they still had any left!
It was a rest stop when one still needed those. Then, after I went to college, whizzing past Vacaville both ways, the Nut Tree shriveled and died. The restaurant closed and In-N-Out Burger was across the freeway, along with an unholy mess of outlets.
Then, surprisingly, it came back, renewed, like a phoenix from the ashes. It has the same logo and bags and pieces of the original, but now put into a really sniffy strip mall with a children's theme park in the middle. The old train I remembered is still there. So we met up with grandma, and there are my kids riding on it!
The merry-go-round is completely new, but not unwelcome. The poor kids were so discombobulated -- it had been snowing in Utah the day before, and here we were in 90 degree weather. They all changed in the car, and on the carousel, only Will chose something that went up and down. Sebastian just sat on a decorative bench and was pleased as punch just to go around in circles.

Against our better judgment, we sent the kids on the roller coaster alone. As you can see by their faces here, in between laps, it was a little more than they were used to. They all still believe that they went around two times because the operator made a mistake -- not that he was giving them a good time by letting them ride it twice. It was cute, though, and about the right size for their age.
Here Sebastian rocks on one of the original rocking horses that I remember from my childhood. These were lined up in the shade just outside the big restaurant. There was a giraffe too, but one of the original train engineers told us that it's gone missing and is a great mystery.

Maddie and Sebi on the plane ride, which was just enough excitement for people who had been driving for five hours in a van. There were also bumper cars, a little rotating ride full of rescue vehicles, and a spin-up-high-in-the-air balloon ride that the kids rode. Also new were several boulles courts out in front, and a pond you could rent and push sailboats about on just inside the entrance which was so cute I wanted to wet my pants. Not that that takes much these days . . .
And Will, in another one of the surviving artifacts from the original Nut Tree. These very groovy animals were set up for peeking through, and they were all still there.

The kids seemed to enjoy it, but I probably loved it more than anyone else. After we'd worn them out on the rides, we went to dinner at Fentons, which has opened another store here. The food was at least as good as the original, and the ice cream was spot on. We thought Sebastian would fall asleep in the middle of dinner, but he rallied himself quite well once he had some ice cream in him.

Oh, and Rob and I shared a black and tan for dessert. "This may not seem very important I know/ but it is, so I'm bothering telling you so." When we were first married, we went to Fenton's and I ordered a black and tan, and Rob said 'oh, I'll share it with you' and when it came, I wasn't so happy about the sharing part. He claims that he had claw marks in his hands from the experience. I think I just jousted with spoons with him, but in any case, it didn't go well. Ten years on, we tried again by mutual consent, and not only did we share it with nary a harsh word or a claw mark, we let Sebi have the leftovers. This, I suppose, is how you end up with leftover applesauce brownies in the Impala at the end of the trip. Someday, maybe!