As the weather has been getting warmer I have had these grand ideas for us to go out walking more in the evenings. It doesn’t work out half the time because one or both of us has something already scheduled (knitting groups, writing groups, appointments, rehearsals, meetings, etc.) but the other half the time we *could* do it, if we were less inclined to come home after a long day and flop listlessly into a chair for the rest of the evening. This weekend, however, took care of all my pent up need to go walking, at least for a little while, and at least half of that I can blame on the new GPS unit I got a few weeks ago.

Since I’ve been at the company now for 5 years, I got a little 5 year certificate and a gift, which was a voucher good for any item I wanted to pick from a rather lengthy list of choices that included everything from the useful (appliances, sets of golf clubs, wide screen televisions, jewelry) to the slightly bizarre (a foozball table, an electronic tracking system for your dog, a cooking demonstration in your home for you and ten of your nearest and dearest). Richard and I had fun poking around the list, pondering various items. The electronic tracking system was tossed around, if only briefly, merely for the amusement factor of the debate over whether or not it would fit on a squirrel, and whether we could even catch a squirrel to collar it anyway (no sense in electronically tagging the cats, since they remain indoors and in as sedentary a position as possible for as many hours at a time as they can manage). We toyed with the idea of getting the super cool coffee machine that did nearly everything to coffee you could imagine. But in the end, we decided on a little handheld GPS unit, because we’ve been talking about getting one for a while, and as fun as tracking a squirrel as it runs through the wild might be, the GPS unit would actually get more use.

Last weekend we were in the mood for ice cream, so we used the little GPS unit (henceforth known here as Jeeves, because I selected for it a male voice with a British accent) to find the nearest little local ice cream parlor. And as we were meandering through all manner of cute little residential streets, we stumbled upon signs for a home and garden tour to be held this weekend, in one of the older neighborhoods in Sacramento. Score!

So that was Saturday’s walking binge. We picked up our tickets and our map at the community center in Curtis Park, and set off to go wander through seven very different types of houses, all of which were built in the 1920’s and 1930’s. They ranged in style from a traditional Tudor, with an absolutely marvelous two-story turrent entryway, complete with mounted moose head on the wall, to a rather stark and industrial sort of Moderne house, painted in gun metal grey and sporting the sort of minimalist decor one might find in an Ikea catalog (not our style at all, but it was still interesting to see). We wandered across original wood floors that still had the inlaid borders around the edges, and walked through beautiful gardens with little hidden seating areas and lots of flowers and built in outdoor kitchens hiding back behind ivy coated walls. By the time we were done with the seventh house we’d been walking for about two hours and were getting a bit worn out, but it was a lot of fun. It was getting hot out by the time we were finished, but most of the walking was shaded, due to all the huge trees that line the streets, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Today, however, didn’t have as many trees to provide shade, and the temperatures went up to the low 90’s during the afternoon, so being outside walking around today wasn’t nearly as refreshing as it had been Saturday morning. It was already warm enough outside to make the upper level of the house a bit stuffy by the time we got up this morning; by the time we made it to Woodland to meet Richard’s parents at the Scottish Games, it was getting downright hot. And while there are a lot of shade structures and some trees scattered around the Yolo County Fairgrounds, it was still very, very warm.

It was fun to wander around the grounds and check out all the booths though. We were good and did not buy anything, mainly because we still have yet to hang any of our existing artwork on the walls in the house, despite having been there for nearly a year now. We ate Celtic Rolls for lunch, which were basically some kind of spiced meat mixture wrapped in puff pastry (not very traditional, but we were aiming for something small, and that was about the only choice we had). We watched border collies have a ‘tea party’ (cute, but long). We listened to several musical groups perform, one of which included a didgeridoo in every song. We were hoping to see large burly men tossing telephone poles, but the only thing being tossed the whole time we were there were hammers (huge weights attached to poles).

It’s been a long weekend, what with all the walking, even though it doesn’t feel as if we got much actually done (as is obvious from the growing accumulation of dust bunnies lurking underneath the furniture). But it was a fun weekend nonetheless, full of walking and seeing new things and eating delicious food and doing a little knitting and a little writing and that makes up for the sore muscles and sunburned faces that are all that’s left of two very long days.