i moved to Sonoma County aka the North Bay, last December and since then i’ve been involved in a whirlwind of activity revolving around my vacation rental the Sebastopol Guest House.

this wasn’t just getting the property itself ready, but it was learning the ins and outs of running a business, starting an LLC, business licenses, permits, planning committee meetings, tax preparation, the list is endless.  all of these new learnings  combined with my past experience in the hospitality business and my education in hospitality management lead me to believe i am pretty well versed in what it takes to start a vacation rental business and how to list a property, at least in Sebastopol.

May-October is the peak season and i have been booked almost every weekend, not bad for the first season.  i think it will be really quiet come November, but hey that works well for me too. i can take more time to check out fun things in my area to do and maybe go on a real vacation…….where will it be??

adaptability.  that is a word you have to know and embrace when you travel, adaptability. plans can change in an instant, and you may or may not have any control over the situation.

last weekend i was lucky in the fact that i hadn’t left the Bay Area for Wendover and i was able to cancel all of my reservation from the comfort of my couch.  most participants were already on site and some had driven cross country or even come in from another country for the races.  not as easy for them to just, “make new plans.”

the closing of the Wendover door opened the door to Sebastopol weekend activities, and i made good use of the time in town.  this weekend was the annual Gravenstein Apple Fair at Ragle Ranch Park so i headed over there on Saturday with my Mom and a friend of hers.

yum.  that is a good word to sum up the fair….yum.  i LOVE apple pie, and there was plenty to choose from at the fair, that’s for sure!  i opted not to buy an entire Kozlowski apple & blackberry pie, a decision i regret today and purchased a piece of their apple pie instead.  it was SO good and the perfect treat for a Saturday afternoon.

the fair was full of arts & craft vendors, live music, food trucks, and of course….apples.  it wasn’t what i had planned for Saturday, but it was a really fun day at the park, and i’m glad i had the opportunity to enjoy the event!

image courtesy of gravensteinapplefair.com

well i did it.  i managed to put all of the Argentina pictures into the blog posts where they belong.  it really took all of my control not to rewrite things and make corrections, but i thought i should preserve what was there, what was written back in September 2011.

i look back fondly on the trip, and can only hope that at some point i will be able to take another month long trip.  i still have Peru on my mind, and feel that after three years if i’m still feeling strongly about going back that it is something i need to do.

i have some time off in October but not enough to go on a long trip, so i decided for cost and time sake to go to Hawaii and visit some friends there.  although i’ve been a number of times, it will be nice to get away and sit on a beach for a few days.

ok, we all know how little i actually post to this site, but that doesn’t mean i don’t look at it from time to time, or talk about it. so today, i’m proudly sharing info about my site and it is brought to my attention that all of my pictures from September 2011 posts are gone. i mean ALL of my pictures are gone.

what happened? i have no idea. do i need to remind you i’m not a tech savvy person? could it be that i did all of these posts on my iPad and at some point last year i had to have my iPad wiped clean? maybe that was it? but i could have sworn i created other posts on the iPad and those pictures seem to be there. or so i think.

an entire month of post pictures gone. vanished. and you know it was that month spent in Argentina and there was a post a day with numerous pictures per post. sigh. i can only hope that i was prolific enough in my writing that i can figure out what pictures were there originally.

this reminds me a little bit of when i erased my memory card by mistake on my Peru trip and thought i had lost all of those pictures forever. only to realize that you don’t ever completely erase everything and you CAN recover erased images from a memory card. all it took was a camera shop and $60.

realistically no one really reads this blog, so wouldn’t i just be reloading images for my own sake? i have a hard copy photo album of Argentina and an electronic photo album (which you can link to from this site), do i really need to put in the effort to reload? i think i do, i can’t leave things partially complete, i just don’t work that way.

but hey, maybe this has all happen so i can get back in touch with my inner-blogging self……..probably not, but it was a thought.

it’s worse than usual isn’t it?  here it is four months into the new year and not one post.  i could chalk that up to the fact that i haven’t been anywhere since January 1, but really that hasn’t stopped me in the past from writing a little something about nothing.

the real issue is that i sold my house and bought a new one and i’ve been in the process of getting it all fixed up.  you might think that doesn’t have anything to do with travel, ah… but it does.

you see, my new property is in beautiful Sonoma County in the town of Sebastopol and there are two homes on one lot, and i’ve been fixing up the larger one to use as a vacation rental.

it’s walking distance into town, which means good food, wine tasting, galleries, live music and movies, all within 5 minutes from my doorstep. a short drive away you can visit wineries, the beach and a slew of little coastal towns.

i love it there and look forward to having more free time to poke around, as weekends have been filled with trips to Home Depot and a lot of housework.  i think this is going to be a fun summer.