A College Road Trip

My husband and I drove up to northern California to visit our college kids during one of those rare trips that don’t involve hauling clothes bags and furniture or visiting the closest Target or Ikea.

First up was Friday night in Rohnert Park, where we replenished our older daughter’s food stores at Safeway before taking her and her roommate to dinner. The next morning I woke early to try and retrace the first 45 minutes of a run I’d done two years prior, including circling a few spruce-lined parks near the edge of campus. It was cold but clear, just like the last time, and moving through the quiet residential neighborhoods, it was easy to pick the student-occupied houses by the condition of the yards and cars. I felt like just a regular resident out for a Saturday morning run, knowing where most of the streets intersected and, importantly, where all the unlocked bathrooms and water fountains were located. After three years of visits, this peaceful college town in the heart of wine country started to feel like a second home.

Soon as I returned to our motel, I showered, dismissed a full body rash (must be the new soap) and got in the car to drive an hour and 20 minutes east to UC Davis for Picnic Day. Picnic Day is part open house, part festival and despite ridiculous prohibitions (“All of my friends are going to be drunk, so you can’t meet them!”), we had a great time. Our younger daughter did speak the truth: at 9 a.m. an outdoor party at an Alpha Chi fraternity house already was packed and a few minutes later we followed a group of highly inebriated coeds onto campus, with them swigging from suspicious Nalgene bottles.





Gilbert and I watched a parade along the main campus drag while waiting for Alex to get off work at The Silo, which is essentially a food court surrounded by campus shops. Then we all headed from her off-campus dorm to get good seats for the 35th running of the Doxie Derby, where, as the slogan on our T-shirts goes, “Every Dog is a Weiner.”



Alex took two short videos from the earlier heats, so you can get an idea of what the competition was like. (These are my first video uploads, so bear with me.) There were upsets and a few do overs, along with one extremely close finish thanks to one pup's sudden surge from behind. Some dogs ran the wrong way, towards the exit, or refused to leave their kennel start at all. The crowds, which swelled to thousands, were totally into it.




After smoothies, we all headed back to Sonoma State University for the dance team’s annual show after dinner at a pizzeria in Cotati.


Elise had quite a few fans in the crowd. She was in every dance the second act and despite being obviously tired, she maintained her signature stage presence -- even during a wardrobe malfunction.




While Alex went to the movies with a friend, and Elise celebrated somewhere with her dance team members, we headed back to our room to try and grab some sleep before waking way too early to drive back to Davis for a hearty breakfast with Alex before dropping her at her dorm while the rest of the town slept off a hangover. Luckily, we were spared any LA backups, which got us home in 8 hours instead of the usual 9 or 10. See, we're learning.