Anniversary flowers in Upland

Foothill Boulevard is the reason an Upland anniversary looks different from an anniversary anywhere else in Southern California. The street is historic Route 66, and the restaurants that sit on it have been taking anniversary reservations for generations: the Sycamore Inn on Foothill in Rancho Cucamonga traces back to an 1848 stagecoach stop and has been a steakhouse for most of the time since, and the Magic Lamp Inn a few blocks west is one of the best-preserved pieces of mid-century Route 66 neon left standing on the whole alignment. Add the Buffalo Inn on West Foothill in Upland, the dining rooms in Claremont Village along Yale and Harvard where Walter's has been a fixture for decades, and the Victoria Gardens restaurants in Rancho Cucamonga, and a couple marking a date in this valley usually ends up within four miles of home. That compresses the geography of an anniversary delivery into something a local driver can actually hit.

The other Upland landmark that shows up in anniversary orders is the one you can see from almost any street in town: the Euclid Avenue median. Laid out in the 1880s as a divided parkway with a bridle path down the center, it still runs the length of the city, and the Madonna of the Trail monument at Euclid and Foothill — one of twelve identical monuments placed along the National Old Trails Road and dedicated here in 1929 — is where a good number of Upland couples have had photographs taken. It is also a useful landmark for a driver. Euclid, Mountain, Central and Campus are the four north-south arterials that carry almost every delivery in the city, the 210 caps the north end and the 10 the south, and a bouquet crossing from a shop in Ontario to a house in north Upland is a straight run up one of those four streets rather than a freeway hop.