The Nut Tree and Memory Lane

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 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!
Comments
I'm so jealous.
But then again, I get tired just looking at the photos -- let alone traveling while pregnant! How do you do it?