SACRAMENTO (Day 9 - part 1)

Our first stop of the day was Santa Rosa for breakfast with a friend of mine from college. This took us across the watery terrain of Skaggs Island.

Morning traffic, fortunately not headed our way!

Thick fog

Santa Rosa...

I'd never seen this before, but apparently o/c is for "overcrossing," which is a bridge over an obstacle such as a river, canal, railway or in this case, the freeway.

The Spinster Sisters restaurant is named in honor of Isolina and Claudina Canevari, a pair of sisters who were two of five daughters of Italian immigrants in the 1920s. The family ran a deli in this building named La Rose Market. The two girls lived upstairs and never married... hence being known as "spinsters," a term originally used in the mid-1300s simply to mean a women who spun yarn (on a spindle), but later evolved into a slightly derogatory terms for an unmarried, older woman.

Santa Rosa was home to Charles M. Schultz, creator of the Peanuts characters.... Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Woodstock.

A glimpse inside the visitor center

We completed our brief city visit with a stop at Russian River Brewing Company, where we had lunch with a friend of mine from elementary school... someone I hadn't seen in almost 40 years!

On our drive to Sacramento, we passed through the vineyard covered hills covered of Sonoma and Napa.

Miles and miles of grapes .... This dog billboard was HUGE!

The sun was starting to get low in the sky when we arrived at Sacramento, but we still managed to squeeze in a visit to Sutter's Fort.

Sutter's Fort (originally called New Helvetia or New Switzerland) was started in 1839 by John Sutter (1803 - 1880), a Swiss immigrant and pioneer in the Mexican Alta California province. It is also associated with the formation of Sacramento.

In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill. Miners seeking their fortune overran Sutter's land and the fort was abandoned. It was restored and became a National Historic Landmark in 1961.

Map of the fort. Click for a larger view

The center courtyard .... with a beehive oven

The weaving room

The bakery

The bakery stores

The central building ... with its dining room

The central building is a two-story adobe structure built between 1841 - 43. It's the only original surviving structure.

The clerk's office

The doctor's office

If you look closely at the bed, you can see pieces of rope sticking out. Back then, beds were wooden frames with pegs so that ropes could be pulled very tightly across it to create a woven framework. By morning, however, the ropes had loosened and had to be pulled tight again... hence the origin of the phrase "sleep tight." In some cases, mattresses were added on top, but these were stuffed with straw (making a lovely home for many critters)... which finished off the nightly phrase with "don't let the bedbugs bite."

Sutter's office ... with a weasel quiver (a bit undignified, if you ask me!)

View of the grounds from the central building

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