Our trip starts out not exactly on the right foot or on the left one either. It seems that Jack, our GPS, in an update of his maps, decides to delete the maps for North America and so when I look for Fairfield the answer I get is someplace in Ireland. But we have plenty of back up. We have my phone and we have the less than ideal system in the car. Anyway we find our way to Fairfield without any problem because we know where it is anyway and proceed to find a McDonald’s in a shopping mall that isn’t open. We give up on Fairfield and stop for breakfast at McDonald’s in Vacaville. It is OK, not great.
Our first sightseeing stop is in Redding, California. We go to the City Hall where they have a very nice sculpture garden. There are various works— some made of wood some made of granite or metal in a park like setting. We take advantage of the very small number of people in the park to take some pictures.
Next we go to the Turtlebay Exploration Center where we see the number one attraction in Redding, the Sundial Bridge. It is a pedestrian crossing of the Sacramento River. A guard on the bridge is nice enough to take a whole bunch of pictures of us. It is not possible to spend too much time on the bridge since we are melting! The temperature is 95°!
For lunch we stop at The Habit in Redding. I am not very hungry since we had a big breakfast between 9:30 and 10. But John manages to finish up anything I leave behind. While we are waiting for our food, a guy next to John has a conversation him. What is it with people spontaneously talking to us!? This guy needs to rant about the unfairness of the gender-neutral bathroom situation. He wants to wash his hands! He shouldn’t have to wait around for the bathroom to be free! We are somewhat taken aback. I take out my Purell and we quietly clean off our hands.
The rest of the ride up to Yreka is uneventful. John drives and listens to the History of English podcast. Between bouts of nodding off frequently I catch sight of Mt. Shasta looming ahead.
We reach our hotel around four and decide to take a little siesta time. Later on we head downtown to see what’s available for dinner and to check out their historic downtown. We have dinner in an historic building whose name is a palindrome. Strings Italian café is in the old bakery. If you write Yreka bakery you will find that it reads the same forwards and backwards. Unfortunately Strings Italian café is not a palindrome.
After dinner we take a stroll up and down main street to see the buildings built in the late 19th century. Although there are a lot of historic buildings it seems that Yreka is not such a prospering town anymore. They had their moment of glory during the late 1800s gold rush but now only about 7000 people live here.
We have had a really great start to our vacation!