Happy Birthday D!

Happy belated 4th of July! I had a really great celebration with my fiance up in Sonoma this weekend for the holiday. It's also his birthday today so we had a good reason for a mini-get away. I booked the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn from a great deal on Travelzoo a little while back and I've been really looking forward to staying here. I knew someone who got married here once and after I saw the photos from the website, I just had to stay here at least once. And I'm so glad we did. We drove up Thursday afternoon after work and really enjoyed ourselves. The service at the Fairmont in Sonoma is fantastic. (I should really Yelp this hotel!) The staff in general were very happy and attentive, which is really a great combination. We had dinner at Sante the first night and very wine-country worthy and definitely lived up to it's hype! Now that I've been away from Manhattan for good 3 months, I've been craving restaurants of this caliber. Too bad Sonoma is so far away... I guess I need to scope out more restaurants like this in San Francisco. Anyway, I highly recommend Sante! On Friday, we got a couples massage treatment at the Fairmont spa and hello, it was again, amazing. We've stayed at fancy hotels and received spa treatments but the couples massage at the Fairmont at Sonoma was very memorable. The "Bathing Ritual" is quite fun, if not good for the body. We celebrated Independence Day by having dinner at the General's Daughter and watching the spectacular fireworks that put many other Bay Area fireworks to shame! (Apparently, they also have a parade in the morning, but we completely missed it!) Not only were the fireworks quite diverse in type but the length was really amazing for a small town fireworks! I think it went on for at least 20 minutes, if not 30! I really can't recall because by this time, I had about 4 glasses of delicious wine from the open bar. Yes, you heard me, open bar. I was quite impressed with their all-inclusive July 4th Annual BBQ at General's Daughter. There was live music, too, which really made the mood quite festive. As you can imagine, I was in no shape to run Saturday morning... Too much wine = painful hangover. On our way back, we stopped by the Napa Premium Outlets and did some more damage to the wallet. Me, mostly at the BCBG and Barney's Outlet and D at Perry Ellis and Kenneth Cole stores. We even had a quite evening by watching WALL-E. Which I highly highly recommend. And today, we celebrated D's birthday with both his family and mine. And I gave him his presents... one of which was the NIke+ SportBand. He wasn't as thrilled about this new device as I was. But then, he only started running because of me. Once he sees how it works, I'm sure he'll love it! I think...