Delivering to a Chico student is its own skill, and it is mostly about the door. The residence halls sit on the west and north edges of the campus rather than at the First Street entrance, and a delivery addressed only to the university waits at a counter — give the hall name and the room. The bigger share of students live off campus in the rental belt that wraps the university: Nord Avenue and West Sacramento Avenue on the west side, Ivy, Hazel, Chestnut and Warner Streets between campus and downtown, and the lower numbered West avenues off The Esplanade where 1920s houses have been divided into four and five bedrooms. Those addresses share a single front door, the bell frequently does not work, and at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday nobody is home because everybody is in class. The fix is a mobile number in the delivery note. One text from the driver saves an arrangement that would otherwise sit on a shared porch until six.
Grown-up Chico romance uses a smaller and better-behaved map. Hotel Diamond at 220 West Fourth Street is the restored downtown hotel on the City Plaza side of the grid, and the whole evening around it is walkable — 5th Street Steakhouse at 345 West Fifth, the Senator Theatre marquee up at 517 Main, the El Rey on West Second, Red Tavern a short way up The Esplanade, the Sierra Nevada taproom over on East 20th. Flowers here belong in the room ahead of check-in rather than at the table; a restaurant has nowhere to keep a vase during service and a bouquet carried through a two-hour dinner and then three blocks of Main Street arrives home tired. The chain hotels along Cohasset Road and Business Lane by the Highway 99 interchange, Oxford Suites Chico among them, are the more forgiving option when the arrival time is vague, because they have night staff and a desk that will hold something. For any hotel, the booking surname is the detail that makes it work.
The proposals happen in the park, and Chico's park is not a normal municipal park. Bidwell Park runs east from the edge of downtown for roughly eleven miles along Big Chico Creek and covers something close to 3,700 acres, which makes it one of the largest city parks in the United States. The lower end is the civilised half: One-Mile Recreation Area with Sycamore Pool, the creek-side paths along Vallombrosa Avenue, the shaded lawns where half of Chico's engagement photographs get taken. The upper end is wild — Five-Mile, Bear Hole, Salmon Hole, basalt and blue oak and a creek in a canyon, and no vehicle access to most of it. Flowers cannot be delivered to a swimming hole; what works is having them waiting at the house, the hotel room or the car park afterward. Tell us the plan in the note and we will time the drop to it rather than to the middle of the afternoon.