Love Romance flowers in San Rafael

The geography of romance in this county is unusual because so much of it happens on a boat. The Larkspur ferry terminal on East Sir Francis Drake and the SMART stations at Downtown San Rafael and the Marin Civic Center carry a very large share of the local working population into San Francisco and back, which produces two flower patterns you do not see inland. The first is the cross-water couple — one person in a San Rafael apartment, the other in the city — where the delivery is timed to be standing on the counter before the evening ferry lands rather than at some point during a workday nobody is home for. The second is the commuter surprise, which rarely works: a bouquet sent to someone who is about to spend fifty minutes on a boat and a walk up Market Street is a bouquet that arrives home destroyed. Send it to the house instead. If the point is for other people to see it, send it to the workplace — the BioMarin campus on Lindaro Street, the Marin Civic Center on Civic Center Drive, the McInnis Parkway offices, the Kerner Boulevard studios and trades — and understand that a workplace delivery is a public act. Some people love that. Ask first if you are not certain, because a large arrangement on a shared desk is a conversation the recipient has to have all afternoon.

Restaurant tables, handled properly. San Rafael's dining rooms are small and family-run and one person is working the door, so the order of operations matters: phone them, find out whether a vase can go anywhere and at what hour, and only then place the delivery with that hour written down for us. Downtown, the usual destinations are Sol Food on Lincoln Avenue, the Puerto Rican kitchen that functions as this city's front room, Il Davide on A Street, Vin Antico on Fourth Street and Lotus Cuisine of India further along Fourth, with the Smith Rafael Film Center mid-block on Fourth for a date that is a film rather than a dinner — October, when the Mill Valley Film Festival takes over its screens, is the busiest romantic fortnight downtown all year. Beyond the city limits, Marin Joe's on Casa Buena Drive in Corte Madera is the vinyl-booth institution, the Buckeye Roadhouse sits just off 101 in Mill Valley, Poggio and Sushi Ran are the Sausalito bookings, and Left Bank and Picco are on Magnolia Avenue in Larkspur. The move that works better than any of them: have the flowers at home in the late afternoon, so the room is already right when the two of you walk back in at ten. It costs the same and no one has to carry a vase past a hostess stand.

Where people live here, and what that does to a delivery. Downtown San Rafael's apartments sit above the Fourth Street and B Street shopfronts, reached through a single street door with a keypad — send the unit number and, if you have it, a code, because a courier standing outside a locked lobby is a surprise that ends in a phone call to you. The Canal, along Canal Street, Medway and Bellam behind Pickleweed Park, is the densest housing in Marin and works the same way: the unit and the buzzer do the work, and the leasing office is the reliable fallback. The Northgate corridor in 94903 is mid-century apartment and condominium stock with interior courtyards. Santa Venetia runs along Gallinas Creek in lanes that map apps get wrong. Terra Linda is Eichler country, where the glass wall facing the street means an arrangement left inside the atrium can be seen from the living room, which is a small gift of its own. Sun Valley, Gerstle Park and the Dominican hillsides are stairs and narrow parking. Peacock Gap and Loch Lomond sit out Point San Pedro Road past the marina, one road in and out, and are morning deliveries rather than afternoon ones.