One of the California Gold Country must see places is Columbia State Park. Located in the foothills along Highway 49, just north of Sonora, this state park is rich in Gold Country Lore.
Bodie State Park is located along California Highway 395, south of Reno near the town of Bridgeport. It’s an easy day trip from Yosemite over Tioga Pass. Bodie is almost unique in that it is one ghost town that, even though only a small percentage of the original buildings are still standing, it looks like it was a vibrant town only yesterday. Well worth the time to visit.
If you were blindfolded, taken to Goblin Valley and told that you had just walked through a Stargate and were now on the mysterious red planet Entrada Prime, it might just be believable. Goblin Valley State Park near Hanksville, Utah, is just that kind of place. Just a little imagination, and you can easily pretend that you’re not on Earth any longer. In fact, portions of the space comedy “Galaxy Quest” were filmed here because of the unusual shapes of the rocks. In the movie, some of the rocks were alive and attacked Tim Allen!
The Real Florida. That’s what they call the Florida State Park system. Whether you agree is up to you, but when you venture out and away from the theme parks of Orlando, you certainly see a different side of Florida. Yesterday we traveled over to the west coast of Florida near the town of Silver River to a great little state park called Homosassa Springs State Park. Our purpose was to visit the wildlife exhibit. This park has a great exhibit of animals indigenous to Florida, including the Florida Panther, bobcats, deer, and many dozens of species of birds, including the endangered Whooping Crane. There are also several alligators and manatees here. Continue reading →
A good deal of the recreation in California in the summer months centers around water, or the highest parts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Pacific Ocean brings mild weather with ocean breezes, and the Sierras offer high altitude relief from the constant heat of the San Joaquin Valley. The truth is, for all the great recreation available in California, it’s a hot, dry landscape in the summer months. It’s not called the “Golden State” because of the gold rush in the 19th century, but for the golden fields of dried up grass. For the most part, the summer in California is a dry, uncomfortably hot place. Continue reading →
We’ve all seen the classic western movies depicting life in the west, and the glorious days of the American cowboy. The “wild west” has always seemed like the place to be in a perfect world, and, of course, Jesse James was made into a hero by American folk lore. Of course, make any trip to a restored ghost town that has a minimal museum, and a good look at the dental tools used back then could probably change your mind about the glory of the old west. Those were hard times. The people who lived then did not enjoy everyday luxuries, and the tools used (it’s hard to call them “instruments”) by dentists paint a picture of the wild west that’s anything but fun. Continue reading →
