Liza and Aaron are getting married in the small town of Boonville, CA, about two and a half hours north of San Francisco and Berkeley. Boonville is located in the heart of Anderson Valley, a stretch of beautiful wine and farm country just north of Napa and Sonoma. Most of the weekend will be spent in and around the Boonville Hotel in "downtown" Boonville. We love this place: the owner, Johnny Schmitt, has created a warm, welcoming escape, and he has given us total run of the hotel for the weekend. We can play our own music, cook in the kitchen, swing from the rafters, whatever.
Why Boonville?
So, why are we going all the way up to Boonville? This past spring, we
landed in Boonville on our way back from a trip up the Pacific coast to
Mendocino. We stopped for lunch and wandered into the interesting-looking
hotel across the street. Johnny, the owner, toured us around his beautiful
renovation of an old roadhouse (but with hammocks and terraced gardens!),
served us a delicious meal by the fire, sent us down the road to his parents'
apple orchard/cooking school...and caught us city-kids hook, line, and
sinker!
So when it came time to pick a special, bucolic spot for our wedding weekend escape, we thought Provence? Tuscany? (okay, we also thought about Hoerve, Denmark) Pshaw...life is beautiful in Boonville!
Since then, the more time we've spent in Boonville, the more we like the place. The setting is idyllic, and the town has an oddball, idiosyncratic vibe...some real characters and stories...in various ways it's familiar and reminds us of areas we spent time in growing up. On New Year's it will be quiet, lush, expansive, and embracing of the warmth and love that we will bring together.
About Boonville
Boonville is in the middle of one of the most beautiful parts of the country.
The town is about 20 miles in from the Pacific coast, nestled deep within
the coastal redwoods, along the Navarro River. This lush valley is ideal
for growing grapes, so vineyards and wineries cover the rolling landscape.
Rugged individualists settled in Anderson Valley in the early 1850s, including
W.W. Boone (a relative of Daniel Boone) for whom the town of Boonville
was named. The area remained isolated from the outside world well into
the 20th century, and the people of the Valley even created their own
language, called “Boontling,” which modern linguists regard
as one of the world’s most extraordinary examples of a “homemade”
language. Although few people are fluent in Boontling today, one can still
catch bits of the language used by some of the older locals in their everyday
conversation.
It should be pointed out that Boontling arose as a way to keep tourists
and visitors at bay, though compared to neighboring areas, Boonville is
relatively quiet and undiscovered, some nice, flattering articles written
about the town recently have started to change all of that, and traffic
is increasing:
- Travel
and Leisure had a big spread on the area about a year ago
- via magazine has a great article on the area
- As does Sunset magazine
- Even the NY TIMES
- There’s also this local site and the the local chamber of commerce is pretty useful.
