I’ve heard it said you should never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach — and perhaps I also shouldn’t browse through the Huell Howser Archives on an empty stomach! Huell definitely loved to do segments involving food, and many of his segments involved going in search of various types of food, where he was always very happy to do […]
It was easy enough for me to find this brightly painted (and lovingly cared for) historic site along Albion Street in the village of Mendocino. According to The Hiker’s Hip Pocket Guide to the Mendocino Coast by Bob Lorentzen, the first Chinese arrived in this area when their boat, headed for the gold rush, was shipwrecked on the Mendocino coast. […]
This Classic episode of California’s Gold inevitably brings back memories from my childhood of traveling south along Highway 99/Interstate 5 toward the Tehachapi Mountains and seeing acres and acres of pumps working away in the fields on both sides of the road. As the years passed, the number of pumps visible from the highway grew ever smaller. And indeed, oil […]
Looks like the end of the road — and it is actually an extremely short section of paved bike path that comes from nowhere and leads nowhere, at least for now. But I had searched out this spot after noticing what looked like a couple of old quarries on Google Maps, and when I arrived, I wasn’t disappointed. Well, maybe […]
When I chose to feature this hour-long episode of Visiting (original air date April 1998) I had no idea that, in addition to the two segments described below, it actually contained a surprise at the end — a couple of extra hidden gems from Huell’s 1998 Videolog series. I especially enjoyed seeing the hike into the San Gabriel Mountains near […]
Back in March 2020 I published a post (Written in Stones) in which I mentioned that I would love to travel around the state photographing California Historical Markers. I’ve definitely shot quite a number of them over the years, but I’m still not able to make this a full-time project. When I recently came across a book titled California Historical […]
This week Huell presents a somewhat bittersweet tale of two fireboats — old Fireboat #2, also known as the Ralph J. Scott, serving with pride for 78 years; and her replacement, the shiny new Warner Lawrence, which took over the job in 2003. The episode combines two half-hour segments of Visiting; the first aired in June 1996, and the update […]
Last Wednesday I featured an episode of Huell Howser’s Road Trip in which he visited the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, so today I thought I would share a few of the many wonderful things I saw there on my recent visit. Though relatively small, this world-class museum is packed with so many amazing artifacts and works of art that […]
Back in the 1990s the Big Guy and I briefly considered relocating from the Sacramento Valley to the area around Clear Lake, and the city of Ukiah (on U.S. 101, about a 30-minute drive from the lake’s north shore) looked to me like an attractive option. We never actually moved, and I never even managed to visit Ukiah — until […]