Washington D.C., 1957 — Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House and I Love Lucy was in its final season on TV when my mom and dad along with my eldest sister visited the nation’s capital in 1957. They were undertaking a pretty epic road trip that began with my mom and sister taking the train from California to […]
This is a fun yet informative episode that I’d never seen until I stumbled upon it today, as I was going through the very long list of shows Huell Howser did around California. It makes clear what an important role Sutter’s Fort played in the development of the Sacramento valley during the Gold Rush and long after — not only […]
I was inspired to share this episode of California’s Gold after seeing Rebel Girl’s post Wind Power on the Photogate blog. I can only imagine what it must feel like to stand at the top of one of these massive machines! It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the scale of the rotors, even after seeing them from this […]
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Sacramento River Delta fairly bustled with paddlewheel steamboats traveling between the cities of Sacramento and San Francisco. Most of these iconic riverboats have been long forgotten; but the sister ships Delta King and Delta Queen, launched in 1927, are two survivors of that bygone era. For 50 years one of the most […]
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the freeway sign pointing towards Mare Island was yet another of the familiar signs I saw along the road to San Francisco’s Bay Area, but I never really thought about what sort of place it was or what went on there until much later. In this episode of California’s Gold Huell tours the naval shipyard […]
During the 1960s, every road trip I took with my family down Interstate 80 toward San Francisco was highlighted by a few familiar landmarks. One of these was the old “Mothball Fleet” anchored in Suisun Bay. At the time I didn’t really understand the significance of these ships, but I was always impressed by their bulky outlines far away across […]
October 1996 — A quick trip to Cicely, Alaska. The TV show Northern Exposure aired in the US from 1990 to 1995. It was set in the fictional small town of Cicely, Alaska; but it was actually filmed in the very real small town of Roslyn, Washington. In the fall of 1996, while my mom and I were visiting Leavenworth, […]
This week I wanted to share an episode from California’s Golden Parks, another series that Huell Houser created. This is another occasion when Huell gets a chance to go a bit deeper and see things most visitors might never get a chance to see and hear stories that don’t often get told. In fact, as you’ll see in the episode, […]
Fort Ross, March 2003 — After I posted pictures last Monday of our trip to the coast in January 2003, I found more images already on my hard drive that I’d forgotten about, from a visit two months later. We had cool but sunny weather in March — and there was time to see the inside of historic Fort Ross […]