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Marla Jo Fisher
Marla Jo Fisher
Marla Jo Fisher

I just got back from our annual family road trip, which this year was missing one member: Cheetah Boy.

He just got a restaurant job, so he had to stay home and start his orientation.

Now, there was absolutely not one chance in Hades I was leaving my 18-year-old son alone in charge of my house for eight days, because I still wanted to have a house when I got home.

That’s why I hired a dog-sitter to stay here with Buddy the Wonder Dog with the idea that she’d also run interference on my son, who was supposed to be staying at his friend’s house the entire week.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way, but I don’t have 50 pages, so I’ll let you use your imagination.

Meanwhile, Curly Girl and I, accompanied by my friend and her teenage son, drove happily up the 101 Freeway to Sonoma County, where we planned to mooch off my rich friend Ulysses.

Now, I suspect it annoys her when I say she’s loaded because she doesn’t live like a rich person. She used to be a working stiff like the rest of us until she discovered a knack for real estate.

She drives an old Prius with a big rusty dent in the fender, is indifferent to fashion trends (I’m not sure she knows who Kim Kardashian is), spends most of her time on her iPad shopping for more distressed property to buy and sell, and only bought a Victorian mansion because she liked the old crumbling estate and outbuildings surrounding it.

Still, it gave us a chance to stay in a real Victorian mansion in wine country. For free. We liked that part. Especially because there were not one but two wine-tasting rooms right there on the property.

Sounds like a lovely dream, right? No reason to ever even leave the yard.

Sadly, however, the two teenagers with us didn’t appreciate this at all.

You’d think they would have rejoiced that their hard-working moms could relax with adult beverages in hand, surveying the grapevines and – I’m not kidding – a family of wild turkeys.

No. They demanded activities. Every darn day.

We should have had them out there hoeing the vineyard – or whatever farmworkers do in a vineyard – I’m somewhat unclear on that point.

Instead, we drove them past golden, rolling farmlands and through groves of redwood trees to the tiny hamlet of Occidental, where they went zip-lining with Sonoma Canopy Tours, a recommendation from numerous readers.

Now, as you know, I’m not a big fan of teenage obsession with their phones. But I must say, as long as they have reception and their phones remain charged, their electronics eliminate 99 percent of the fighting that formerly went on in the back seat.

I still remember vicious skirmishes with my brother that went on for weeks as we traveled around the country during summer in the back of our un-airconditioned, un-seat-belted Ford Falcon station wagon.

But today’s kids don’t have time to argue, bicker or even remember to use the toilet at the rest stop because they’re too busy seeing their friends’ latest adventures on Instagram and watching videos on YouTube.

Woe betide the family that hits a rough patch, i.e. a place where cellphone reception ends. As we drove to the zip line, down long, narrow, winding country lanes lined with tall trees, our kids endlessly kept each other apprised of the crisis.

“I have one bar. Do you have any bars? No? Oh. Wait. I don’t have any bars. Wait. It’s back. I have bars. Oh, no. They’re gone.”

I was fine with this, as the mystery of the missing bars kept them entertained all the way there. Later, it wasn’t so great when we tried to use the GPS on our phones to find our way home and ended up many miles away at Tomales Bay. In the opposite direction. Oops.

Now, there was no flipping way that I, as a plus-size older woman, was going to hang on a wire and try to propel myself across a forest. On an adventure that would last for two hours.

So my friend and I dumped our kids on the zip-line people, content they’d be occupied enough to forget about their lack of phone reception, and we went and did something better:

We ate.

That is something that Sonoma County is really good at. The whole eating thing.

During our week up there, we managed to tour a goat farm where they make cheese and an oyster farm where they grow oysters in the bay, and visit the famous Cowgirl Creamery cheese store with its dozens of varieties of artisan cheese. And then, of course, there’s the wine tasting.

If you’re up near Petaluma, I recommend checking out Sonoma County Aperitifs, which is run by Laura Hagar. She takes fresh fruit, sometimes culled from people’s backyards, and mixes them with vodka or wine to produce delish little cordials.

She also makes a non-alcoholic drink called shrub, which I’d never even heard of. It’s apple cider vinegar mixed with fresh fruit, and you get the sweetness of the fruit with the bite of the vinegar. She usually mixes it with something sparkling, but I actually just liked a shot of it straight.

The aperitif place is on my friend’s property, which made it very handy for stumbling back there after we drank lots of shrub mixed with champagne.

I brought home way too much of it, and it’s now reposing in my refrigerator, yet I’m loathe to share it with anyone. It’s mine. All mine.

I asked my daughter when we came home Saturday what her favorite moment of the trip was, and she said it was when we took them go-kart racing. Sigh.

It reminded me of when we took the children on an arduous trip to Baja so they could pet baby gray whales at Laguna San Ignacio, and when they came back, they announced that their favorite moment was when they got to play with puppies at the hotel.

So, the takeaway from that is to stop asking my kids about their favorite moments.

And when we got home, we still had a house.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7994 or mfisher@ocregister.com