The first time I heard the name “Petrified Forest,” I pictured an actual forest with upright trees made out of stone and, I don’t know, like fossilized pine cones littering the floor or something ridiculous like that. I don’t mind saying that I was an adult at the time, either, because let’s face it the […]
I have a kid who loves ghost towns and abandoned places, so every time we go anywhere we end up hiking down some overgrown, abandoned railroad tracks or getting way closer to a crumbling former hotel than we’re supposed to. So driving through Nevada was kind of like going through a time portal in the […]
I love castles. I mean, I would never live in one because ghosts, but I love the stillness of a centuries-old stone building, the scale, and the history that you can feel in your bones even if not much of it has ever been written down. Anyway, America is great and everything but it doesn’t […]
I’m veering away from California for a bit because I just returned from a long road trip to the Southwest, and I have things to say. Our first stop was Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, which isn’t just a place you go to look at dinosaur bones (though the dinosaur bones are pretty awesome). There’s […]
On our way to the coast on Friday we passed through Lake County and drove around the eastern shore of Clear Lake. I do want to say up front that I managed to drive all the way through the town of Nice without making even one stupid joke about the very Nice Motel or the […]
If you’ve ever driven through the Auburn State Recreation Area, which is really all you can do because there’s never anywhere to park, you’ve probably noticed a super scary and almost precarious-looking bridge looming over the landscape. That’s Foresthill Bridge, and it’s the tallest structure of its kind in the state of California, much taller, […]
Over the weekend, I took my kids down to the waterfront at Old Town Sacramento. And it wasn’t to watch the boats or for a river cruise or anything, it was to see the sea lions. Wait, what? Sea lions in Sacramento? Yeah, it’s kind of weird. Sacramento is like 100 miles inland, and if […]
I learned two things this weekend: One: Mountain biking is mostly just about saying to yourself, “I can’t believe I didn’t wipe out just then.” Two: You can’t trust the trail reviews on mountain biking sites. Because no serious mountain biker would ever use words like “challenging,” “narrow,” “dangerous in places,” or “sheer drop-off” when […]
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE travel to California’s redwood forests every year to marvel at the few remaining stands of old-growth trees. Sequoia sempervirens, or the coast redwood, thrives in the damp climate along the Pacific Ocean. Some are more than 2,000 years old, and the tallest can reach 380 feet. The state is also home to a second […]
