Anniversary flowers in Fairfield

Fairfield has hotels, and it is worth being honest about what kind. The cluster sits where the traffic is — Gateway Court and Holiday Lane off I-80 near the Cordelia interchange, where the Hilton Garden Inn Fairfield and the Courtyard by Marriott Fairfield Napa Valley Area take the business travellers, the Travis-bound families and the wedding overflow. The second of those names says the whole thing out loud: a Fairfield hotel is marketed by pointing at the Napa Valley twenty-five minutes west. So an anniversary here is usually a departure rather than a destination, and the flowers have to be planned around a drive. West, that drive is California 12 through Jameson Canyon into Napa, where the rooms people book for a tenth or a twenty-fifth are the Napa River Inn down in the old mill on Main Street, Archer Hotel Napa and Andaz Napa on First Street, The Meritage Resort on the south side, Silverado Resort up on Atlas Peak Road, and Carneros Resort out toward Sonoma — with the Napa Valley Wine Train boarding on McKinstry Street for the couples who want the day itself to be the gift. North, the drive is much shorter and stays in Solano County: Suisun Valley Road runs up into the Suisun Valley AVA, past Wooden Valley Winery, the tasting rooms and olive-oil house around Mankas Corner and Il Fiorello, in a valley most of the Bay Area drives past on I-80 without noticing. Closer to home again, the anniversary dinners that stay in town happen along the Suisun City waterfront on Main Street by the marina, and the parties — the fortieth, the fiftieth, the renewal of vows — often take a clubhouse room at Rancho Solano or Paradise Valley, the two city golf courses on opposite sides of Fairfield. And the couples themselves are a specific population: Fairfield fills with people who arrived on a Travis Air Force Base assignment in the seventies or eighties, stayed after the uniform came off, and are now marking long anniversaries in the same Green Valley or Cordelia house they bought then. A fiftieth here is not unusual. It is a Tuesday.