My 85-foot palm tree hissing in "breezy" 30 mph fall Santa Ana winds and a packed suitcase is my boarding pass for a long weekend trip up to Sacramento and California's gold country. I've been attracted to Sacramento and the Gold Country since I was about 10 years old and smitten by a torrid love affair with California history.
As i aged, I began to dream that I'd spend my twilight retirement years tramping overgrown paths between Gold Rush era mining camps, and noodling for artifacts of that era. I've never lost my love of Sacramento and the Gold Rush countryside in El Dorado County. If anything, the mystique of this area still fuels my dreams.
I quietly laugh when I think of the boom town image that springs to mind when many non-Californians think of Silicon Valley. It's not very different from the image most people "back in the states" had of California when they thought about the Gold Rush. And following the overgrown course of Cold Water Creek in northwest Placerville, searching for the remains of Leland Stanford's first store is my idea of a personal bonanza. Some people look for Gold in Stanford's Graduate Business School. I look for where it all began, in a sometime dried up stream bed in a remote corner of a small city.
No matter what your definition of a big strike is in California, you can find it in, or near Sacramento.
Dream of selling your tiny lot and house in Menlo Park and and producing hand-crafted wines from your own vineyard? $500,000 buys you land in El Dorado County with the capability to produce big red wines with a terroir startlingly similar to France or Italy.
Do you need peace and quiet to code you dream web-based app in a softly lighted office with a view of the American River? then check out Folsom, with its quaint Gold Rush cottages next to the Rainbow Bridge.
How about that long repressed dream of opening a motorcycle store stocked with primo after market items that are guaranteed to sell to touring bands of bikers on their way to Po' Reds, a legendary biker watering hole right off Highway 50 in Shingle Springs? the store front can be yours today for less than $500,000 outright. And your success depends on the depth of your pocket and your ability to match inventory to trends. The same scenario applies to dreams of opening a store that caters to the fly fishing crowd that rushes every weekend in season to try and catch native brookies, 'bows, brownies and the occasional lifetime best" salmon or steelhead finning its way up or down an icy Gold Country Stream.
I have a simple point here: Sacramento is set to boom again. As my generation retires and moves into Life 2.0, the siren call of a rural life becomes more compelling. That's why sleepy Sacramento and the adjoining Gold Country is once again swelling.
I"m almost 500 miles away from Sacramento this morning. But this afternoon, I'll be sitting in a window seat on a north bound econojet straining for my first glimpse of California's River of Commerce. the mighty Sacramento, coming into view 15 minutes before I land.
Had I lived in earlier times, or retired under different circumstances, I know where I'd be living now. Somewhere on the edge of Sacramento where the steady sound of a pushing river is louder even than the clack clack clack of a train the going down the track.fully laden den with commerce goods.
So SOuthwest, carry me home, back where I belong, across the hills from Placerville, where my dreams can set me free.--Jim Forbes 10/10/20007 out the door for a very long weekend in the Gold Country.
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