Tuna
Saturday 24 February 2024
We saw a bobcat yesterday afternoon. Sitting outside with a glass of wine, doing very little after a great day in Yosemite, there was this creature, which I first through was a rabbit. Yeah, no, not a rabbit. After a couple of minutes, it wandered away. Didn’t see any other critters or varmints that afternoon or evening.
Today we headed to Sacramento, we took a longer route with some really windy roads up and down hills and were rewarded with gorgeous country side, as opposed to driving down a more direct route and multilane freeways.
We stopped in a town to fill up on petrol as we were getting a bit low. The gas station seemed to attract all the locals and it felt like we were out in the country side a bit, a little bit redneck. The number of big (really big) SUVs that were driving around was amazing.
One interesting town we went through was Angels Camp. As we approached the town the road got very narrow and it felt like we were driving through “old town”, gold rush town. The shops and housing were narrow, small and very close together. Then past an intersection, it felt like “new town”, wider roads, shopping malls and space.
Our first destination (well, only if you don’t count our accommodation or supermarket) was the Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park. The Miwok Native America tribe (apologies if I have expressed this incorrectly) was settled here and used the granite rocks essentially as mortars. The region is plentiful of oak trees so the Miwok used the grinding rocks to pound the acorn into meal. They had a lovely and very informative museum on the area and the Miwok. Unfortunately, the story told is a version of the same around the world. White/Non-indigenous people come in to plunder the region of resources (gold in this case) and in some form decimate or enslave the local indigenous people. However, it was a lovely place to stop to have lunch and to have wander around in the sunshine.
The supermarket was the next stop where I realise that gin was cheap. What would cost AUD80 at home is USD24 here, so I bought a bottle. Might see what the whisky prices are next time. In to our apartment in Sacramento, for the next couple of nights.