Let's Go Places (And Meet People!): Sacramento, California

 

Friends, it's time for me to tell you the story of my 10 day trip to California in May.  We've got a lot to talk about!

Let's start with Sacramento.  I went there to tour the Capitol and meet a friend, and came away with so much more.   Let me take you to the Land of the Yellow Bridge.

How This Trip Came To Be

My travel plans for the next 10 years are to spend at least one night in every state, to tour each state Capitol, and to meet as many of my blogging friends as possible.  Since the Bay Area/Sacramento is home to two of my bloggy friends, and also checks the state Capitol box, this trip was a high priority for my 2025 travel dance card.  Since it's a haul to get there, I wanted to stay for a bit so that I could see the sights.  It wasn't possible to take 10 days of vacation from work, but I craftily used the time difference to my advantage and worked half days so that I had a balance of "stuff I have to do" and "stuff I want to do".

After working out the dates with San and Julie, I scored a coup on the travel hacking front and got airfare for $11 and one hotel night for free.  After flipping a coin, I decided to stay in Sacramento for the first few days and then relocate to San Francisco for the rest of the trip.  I knew that I didn't want to drive while I was there, so that meant a combination of public transport and ride shares to get around.  It also meant that my luggage needed to be as portable as possible, so this was my first carry on only flight.

Beyond that, I didn't plan very much of the trip in advance.  I had an idea of what I wanted to do, and I knew that I would figure out how to do it once I was there.

Monday - getting there

Early on Monday morning, I headed out the door to the Big City Airport where I got on a nonstop flight to SFO.  The flight went off without a hitch and a very fast five hours later we were on the ground.  My travel hacked ticket was on the "nicer" end of economy, so it was a step up from the nickel and dime ticket that I would have gotten if I was paying for it.

Next step: Sacramento.  This was a two step process: take a BART train from the airport and take Amtrak the rest of the way.  I wasn't too clear on the BART part, but I figured it out with a little help from some passersby (there is a BART app that doesn't really do anything, and you have to get the Clipper app to pay for your fare but you don't pay through the app, you have to add the card to your Apple or Google wallet...yada yada it's not hard once you know what you are doing but there were a few steps to figure it out).

BART dropped me off at Richmond, where I had an hour to kill before the next Amtrak train was due.  And let me tell you, it was a long hour.  There's nothing around or in the station, and I wasn't inclined to walk very far since I was weighed down by my luggage.

After an eternity,  I went up to the tracks to wait for the train, and saw a kind of squirrel that we don't have at home.

It wasn't hard to see what was on his mind.

Eventually the train came and the next stage of the journey began.  I hope to take a cross country train trip in the next few years, and this was my first taste of Amtrak life.

The views were gorgeous.  I would not have minded spending all day staring out the window.

An hour and 20 minutes later we arrived in Sacramento, which meant the final but hardest part of the journey.  My Airbnb was a mile and a half away, and it never occurred to me to do anything but walk there.  This was a carry on only trip, so I didn't have a lot of luggage, but I definitely had baggage.  Specifically two laptops and a portable monitor in my backpack.  I got 'er done, but it was a haul.  The route took me from the train station, past the Capitol, and through Capitol Park to my Airbnb in Midtown.

If you're keeping score, it took me five hours to fly to CA, and five hours to get from SFO to the front door of the Airbnb.  I had gotten up at 4:00 AM Eastern, and it was now 3:00 PM Pacific, and I was in quite a daze.  I crawled to the corner grocery store for some breakfast things, and then rested up until 5:00 which was the earliest that I was willing to have dinner.  Sacramento is a food town, so the offerings within just a few blocks were plentiful.  I chose the Mexican place two blocks away for my first meal.

Where I live all of the Mexican restaurants are identical.  I don't mean that in a bad way, but if you were blindfolded you wouldn't be able to tell which restaurant you were in.  Zocalo was a very different experience.

I made myself stay awake until 8:00, which is 11:00 Eastern time and called it a night.  I fell asleep the moment that my head hit the pillow.

Tuesday - too much work but also a lot of play

I woke up at 4:00 AM the next morning and made myself stay in bed until 4:30.  I brewed up a big ol' cup of coffee and took it back to bed with my computer.

At 6:00 I peeked out the window and saw that it was daylight, so I hit the streets of Sac for a run/walk.  

Three things stood out right away: 

• Sacramento is beautiful.  
• The town is very pedestrian friendly.  While of course there is a lot of car traffic, there is a good mix of traffic lights, stop signs, and one way streets to manage the flow.
• There is a serious homeless problem.  In all of the parks, bus stops, and occasionally just walking around there were lumps in sleeping bags.  It was shocking the first time I saw it, and completely normal after that.  
• Sacramento also felt very safe.

I chuckled when I passed the huge dog park.

I got back to my pad, which was a studio apartment, and got ready for my work day.  I set up my laptop and portable monitor on the desk.

As you can see, the workstation was wildly uncomfortable and the work day was five straight hours of meetings.  Thankfully the last three of those hours were off camera, and let me tell you that as soon as the camera went off, I took my work laptop straight into bed, which was the only comfortable place to use it.

As far as Airbnbs go, I have mixed feelings about my Sacramento pad.  Location wise, it was perfect.  Host wise, it was a little shady.  All of the photos in the listing were of bright sunlit rooms.  The problem is that it was on a tree lined street and the building had huge porches at the front and the back which blocked out practically all of the daylight.  The photo of my workstation is in broad daylight with all of the lights in the apartment turned on and it still looks like it's midnight in there, so just sayin' that there was some serious photo editing going on.  On my first day the host messaged me to ask if I minded letting a crew in for their monthly bug spray - um yes I minded and put a stop to that by telling him I had all day work meetings.  

There were no pictures of the shower in the listing, which was a "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me" situation.  Pro tip: if you are renting an Airbnb and there is no picture of the shower, it's because the shower is tiny.  The problem with a shower this small is that the shower nozzle can only spray directly on the top of your head and then drip down on the rest of your body.  I've encountered this situation before and I think that going forward I will raise my Airbnb standards to normal sized showers only.

But even with its flaws, I still prefer the Airbnb experience over a hotel.

Finally the work day ended!  It was noon Pacific time, which meant that I had all afternoon to explore.  I started by eating lunch, which was a side of rice and beans that the restaurant had served with the tacos from the night before, and hit the streets.  My #1 priority was to tour the Capitol, and I had a couple of other ideas to check out.

Let's Tour the State Capitol

I strolled back through the Capitol Park and waltzed in to tour the Capitol (if you're keeping track this would be Capitol #9 of 50).

The dome is a clever dome-within-a-dome.  The problem with a big dome is that it's hard to see the detail from inside, so California's way of handling that is to have a big ol' dome outside and a much smaller dome inside.  So instead of being all hat and no cattle, it's a hat with cattle - or something like that.

As far as state flags go, California's is large and in charge.  You're not going to miss it if you come here.

If you're the Governor of California, you need to put some thought into your official portrait, because you have some competition.

In case you ever need to know, Arnold Swarzenegger has the largest Governor's portrait, but Jerry Brown's is the most valuable.

The best governor's portrait story is George Pardee, who served in the early 1900s.  He was a doctor, and he continued to practice medicine when he was in office.  He was also very diligent about spreading the news that the worst thing that a person could do for their health was to sit in a chair with armrests.  Someone didn't pass the message on to his portrait painter.

With that, the Capitol tour was done and I had a few hours left to explore before dinner.  I had a few ideas about what I was going to do, but once I spied the yellow bridge from the Capitol, I knew that was my next destination.

Anytime there is a big ol' bridge with a foot path, the odds are strong that I will be walking across it.

As I was crossing the bridge I heard an odd noise from the river.  It kind of sounded like a sea lion, but Sacramento is 100 miles from the ocean, so that couldn't be right.  Whatever it was, it was persistent.

I turned around and headed back toward town, and continued to hear the "that sure sounds like a sea lion but there is no way it is a sea lion" noise.  And then I saw a bunch of sea lions.

I asked Google what was up.  It turns out that from the winter to the spring, male sea lions go inland in search of food.  The ladies and the babies stay in the ocean, and the guys come back for mating season.  

I strolled around Old Town Sacramento.

And then I headed back to my pad to meet my dinner dates.

Let's Meet People

Julie had driven in from the Bay Area, and arrived at my Airbnb to pick me up to meet San.  There were no parking spaces available, so we needed to find somewhere where we and her car could hang out for about half an hour before we could meet San. Sutter's Fort State Park stood out as a good candidate, so we headed there to pass the time.  The fort was closed, but the grounds were lovely.  We found ourselves gawking at turtles and ducks in the lake.

We took approximately one million pictures of baby ducks.

Our next stop was to pick up San, and she asked Julie drive us around a few neighborhoods so that I could add phrases like "the 40s" and "East Sac" to my vocabulary.  Dinner was at Tapa the World.  We ordered a few shared plates and started talking, and the next thing we knew it was closing time at the restaurant and the staff was nicely dropping hints that it was time to leave.  I saw that it was 10:00, aka 1:00 AM Eastern time, aka way later than I normally stay up, but I could have kept talking to those two for several more hours.

Julie took us both home, and I crashed as soon as my head hit the pillow.  My first full day in California was complete.

Wednesday - let's work and then play

I woke up refreshed the next day at 5:00, and got out for another run/walk.  I had a lot of meetings, but nothing as obnoxious as the previous day's five hour stretch.  I took all of my off camera meetings in bed.

Once the workday was over, I headed back in the direction of the Capitol.  It's not unusual for state capitols to have a nice green space, but Sacramento was the first time that I had encountered a dedicated tour of just the grounds.

I soon learned what all the fuss is about.  Capitol Park was designed to be a showcase for California's native plants: 40 acres, 800 trees from 80 species, a Peace Rose Garden, and several other gardens.  The tour is only given once a week, and IMO the Capitol tour experience would not have been complete without it.

After the tour I walked a bit further and hit up the Stanford Mansion.  I'm always up for a tour of an old mansion, I've heard of Stanford University, and that's the extent of my Stanford knowledge.

Yep, it turns out that Stanford was more than just a name.  He started out as a lawyer, and then came to Sacramento in the gold mining days to start his second career.  He chose the profitable side, which was to "mine the miners" meaning that he ran a store that sold mining supplies.  That was all very well and good, but soon it was time for career #3, which was to develop the transcontinental railroad and assume Full Robber Baron Status.  As he was launching his railroad career, he took a very years to serve as Governor as one does.

If you're playing in that league, you need a house to match.  Stanford got himself a fixer upper that he expanded to 19,000 square feet.

How many kids do you have if you live in a 19,000 square foot house?  The Stanfords had one, a son who was born later in life, and was very beloved.  I could tell from the way that the guide was setting the stage that the story was not going to have a happy ending.  If I've learned anything from my tours of Rich People Houses, it's that it can be really crappy to be a Rich Person.

The Crappy Rich People Thing that happened to the Stanfords was their trip to Europe when Junior was 15.  Ma and Pa sought treatment for their various ailments, but Junior was the one who ended up needing medical attention.  He came down with typhoid and a few weeks later he was dead.

The next question is what do Rich People do when crappy things happen to them?  There are a variety of ways to handle grief, and the Stanfords saw a clear path.  Their quote was "now that our child is dead, all children are our children".  Their first move was to found the Leland Stanford Junior University.  

Papa Stanford died after a long life, and Mama Stanford got to the point where a 19,000 square foot mansion was just too much.  What does someone who has made the pledge that all children are her children do when she downsizes?  She donated the house to a religious order to use as an orphanage.

As the years went by, downtown Sacramento became more developed, and the Stanford Mansion was kind of in the way, but nobody wanted the bad PR of shutting down an orphanage to get prime real estate.  This is why the mansion survived and today it serves the dual function of a state house for Big Deal political events and a museum for folks like me to pass a few hours.  

It was now mid afternoon, and I had time for another adventure.  I walked a few miles back to Sutter's Fort to see what was behind the wall.  My previous Fort Experience was the excellent Fort Niagara last fall, so maybe Sutter would have something similarly spectacular to offer.

Well, this is awkward.  Sutter's Fort burned down sometime in the late 1800's and the fort was reconstructed as a tourist site back then.  The problem is that Sutter's reputation is not what it was.  Back then he was the big hero who settled the wilds, and today he's the guy who did some pretty awful things to the native people to build his empire and all he has to show for it is this lousy reconstructed fort.

There is one saving grace for those of us who read The Indifferent Stars Above.  Sutter's Fort had a different name back then, but it is where the survivors of the Donner party were taken after they were rescued.  I guess that fun fact plus a water fountain to refill my water bottle was worth the $5 admission.

I finished the fort tour pretty quickly and headed back outside the walls to hang out in the park for a bit, which meant taking a few hundred more pictures of turtles and baby ducks.

And with that it was time for some night life and San and I met up for dinner at her favorite pizza place.  I was liking the trend of having a friend to go out to dinner with each night.

Thursday - on to new adventures!

Sigh, it was time to leave Sacramento.  On Thursday I worked for a little bit, and then packed up my gear and hauled it back to the train station.

Then I got on the train and headed for my next destination.  But that's a story for the next time we meet.

Who has been to Sacramento?  Did you know the story behind Stanford University?  Do you think you would like a half work/half play style vacation?