Central California

On Wednesday, I drove from the San Francisco area toward Los Angeles.  This is actually quite a long drive on Interstate 5 freeway.  There are hills to the right (west) and farmlands to the left (east) all the way until you have to cross a mountain range separating Central from Southern California.  Up in those mountains (at Lebec) is where I spent the night.  Thursday will be my sightseeing day in Los Angeles.

Hills to the east

Farms to the west...Saw a lot of fruit trees,
a big cattle operation, advertisements for
cherries and pistachios.

Water seems to be a huge issue here.  There were all types of canals, aqueducts, and other water delivery systems.  There were also signs encouraging lawmakers to do more to get more water to the area.




The biggest city in this central region is Bakersfield.  I arrived there in time for supper, so I stopped at the restaurant/theater of country music legend Buck Owens, the Crystal Palace.  Had a great steak, and the museum of his stuff is cool, too, for an old-time country music fan.

The End of the Lincoln Highway

On Tuesday, I drove into San Francisco to complete my cross-country journey on the Lincoln Highway.  Lincoln Park is on the western edge of town, with spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge and downtown in the distance.  At the bus stop near the Legion of Honor museum, I found the marker of the Western Terminus of the Lincoln Highway.  This part of my journey had come to an end.

San Francisco sits on a peninsula in the bay, and the city is built on numerous steep hills.  I couldn't take a picture of it, but I drove that crazy Lombard Street section that goes steeply downhill through a series of s-curves.  Tourists were everywhere taking pictures and videos of people driving down that street!   It was actually a really pretty street, but I bet the locals get tired of all the attention.  Here are some views of downtown San Francisco.

I had lunch at Fisherman's Wharf, which was the central shipping district for many years.  Now, it's pretty touristy with the container ships docking somewhere else.  You can see Alcatraz clearly from the shoreline.  Everyone's cooking seafood, and gulls and pigeons are everywhere waiting for you to drop something.




I couldn't resist; I HAD to take a cable-car ride.  I'm so glad I did!  The cars are turned around manually at the end of the line on a crude turntable, and the driver stands upright about 15 feet behind the windshield.  On the 2-3 mile trip to the shopping district, they make several stops in the middle of the street, and traffic has to stop for them.  People board and disembark, and a conductor gets their tickets or money.  I looked around downtown for a few minutes, then rode back to the Wharf.  The hills are incredible, and you can smell the brakes!

I'll be in Southern California next as I begin to wind my way home...

California, Here I Come!

Monday started with the drive over the summit of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, just across the California line from Reno.  These mountains, while higher than those in Nevada, were covered with trees, mostly tall pines.  I had basically not seen a tree all the way across Wyoming and Nevada until I came to the Humboldt River valley in eastern Nevada, and then only a few.  The place where the highways cross over the mountains is Donner Summit, named for the party of pioneers traveling the California Trail who couldn't get over the mountains in time and suffered terribly in the winter here.

On the way down out of the mountains toward Sacramento, I passed through Auburn, a town proud of its "Gold Rush" heritage.  They have preserved and re-used much of their "old town," and they have a HUGE sculpture of a famous citizen panning for gold in a prominent place.  As in many towns near the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in California and Nevada, they had their own "Chinatown" because there were so many Asians working on the railroad.

This is what Lincoln Highway signs look like in this part of California.

Sutter's Fort in Sacramento, near where the first gold was discovered in the 1840s, was also a stopping-off place for new settlers in the area (sort of the place where they could stop, rest, and say "we made it").  It has been reconstructed and is a state historic site.

The Lincoln Highway didn't go straight into San Francisco from Sacramento.  It turned south, through the farming territory of Central California, then circled around toward Oakland, where drivers caught the ferry into San Francisco.  On my way through this territory, I saw a lot of vineyards and fruit trees in the San Joaquin area, then stopped for the night in Tracy.  Here is an LH monument I saw in Galt.






My last stop of the day was at a convenience store I had heard about in Lathrop.  It's decorated as if an alien spacecraft had crashed into its roof.  Kooky, huh?