I have heard many times about the State of Jefferson but never knew the origin story until I watched this 1-hour episode of Road Trip, originally aired February 7, 2008. In fact, I very recently learned that Jefferson is not the only ‘alternative’ state in California’s past: the Territory of Nataqua existed for a short time in northeastern California and […]
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 […]
As we prepared to head home from the coast last Saturday, it was already raining intermittently, with a brief hailstorm earlier in the morning just to keep things interesting. The very real possibility of running into snow in the mountains between Fort Bragg and Willitts was definitely on our minds; we had no chains, and I was glad it was […]
I’ve never been to Ferndale but seeing the cows grazing happily in the fields and the first glimpse of the town’s main street at the beginning of this one-hour episode, I was strongly reminded of Mendocino County and the villages of Point Arena and Fort Bragg. Of course Ferndale is famous for its historic buildings — and you may recall […]
You can’t tell a whole lot about the city of Barstow, California, merely from driving through on the interstate. In fact, you might wonder why anyone would choose to live in such a hot, rather isolated place. But this desert town has a very colorful history — pioneer trails and the railroad, the instant riches of silver mining, and the […]
Roughly halfway through this amazing episode it occurred to me that it might have been titled “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles”! Some of the territory Huell discovers on this Road Trip adventure looks awfully familiar to me, since we passed through the small town of Tehachapi on Highway 58 only a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t have time to stop […]
Huell’s visit to the desert town of Newberry Springs didn’t go according to plan, a situation I think many of us can identify with! This is one of those episodes that I could have sworn I had already featured long ago, mainly because it includes an impromptu visit to the former Sidewinder Café, now renamed the Bagdad Café in honor […]
Even though this one-hour episode of Road Trip is titled “Cotati,” Huell actually spends his day exploring the wider area of both Cotati and Sebastopol in Sonoma of County. I’ve passed through both places along Highway 101 quite a few times and even enjoyed staying in Sebastopol on a number of occasions. So it’s great to learn more about the […]
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is so vast and ever changing that there is no way I could hope to ever see all of its aspects. Every time I go there I’m amazed at how beautiful it is. On this particular day, I traveled along the River Road on my way to Antioch, and after taking a wrong turn I paused […]