Sacramento!

Welcome, pioneering reader, as we finish off our holiday with a couple of days in Sacramento. Sacramento's the state capital of California, with quite a different feeling to San Francisco, perhaps borne out of its very different economic mix: there's almost no tech industry, as everything is focussed on either the California state government, or the very large Sutter Health foundation which is based here.

Sacramento is a historical waypoint: it's at the end of what was called the California Trail, where settlers from the East completed their long walk across the continent for a new life in California (yes, they had wagons, but they didn't actually ride in them: the wagons had no suspension, and given that there weren't any roads, it wasn't a bearable ride). Sacramento also provided easy access to the San Francisco Bay and thus the ocean, via the Sacramento River. Therefore, when the first transcontinental railway was built, it was natural that its initial western terminus should be Sacramento.

Before the railways came, boats were probably the easiest way to communicate with California. An early attempt to reduce the time to communicate with the majority of the population back East was the Pony Express, commemorated by this statue in Old Sacramento:

Now, it didn't actually operate for very long - less than 2 years - but the Pony Express was able to get mail from coast to coast in a week or 10 days, much less than the month or more it would take by ship. What made it redundant was a coast-to-coast telegraph, able to transmit messages more or less instantly.

Old Sacramento itself looks like a bit of a film set, and is home to the California State Railway Museum.

There are plenty of railway exhibits in the museum, but in many ways it's a museum of the history of California and how it was shaped by the railways. Here's the locomotive, named after Leland Stanford - yes, that guy that started the University in our backyard - who was a big part of this history:

The early story of the railways here is very much about that pioneering spirit, building a railway through the incredibly challenging Sierra Nevada mountains, up near Tahoe in fact. A lot of this work was done by immigrant Chinese labour, a fact that's only recently been given the publicity it deserves. The line climbs relatively rapidly to a summit that's over 6000 feet up in the Donner Pass - of course, we all know that Dent is the highest station mainline station in England at a mere 1150 feet. They do things bigger here in the US.

Now I couldn't help feeling there were two things which would really improve Sacramento: I'd say that building the I-5 North/South motorway right through the middle of town wasn't really that conducive to peace and quiet, and, well, we might have enjoyed it more if it wasn't insanely hot:

110 Fahrenheit is about 43 degrees Centigrade

As a result, we found ourselves hopping from air conditioned museum to air conditioned museum, to air conditioned coffee shop, and back to our air conditioned hotel room. Being out in this kind of heat wasn't fun, and it appeared that most of the locals just weren't going out at all - the place was pretty quiet.

In addition to the railway museum, we also went to the Crocker Art Museum, a huge gallery and the first one established west of the Mississippi, and the California Museum, a series of displays of the various groups that have made California their home (and clearly a destination for school trips). Plus, we discovered Temple Coffee, the thing which is undoubtedly making Sacramento the top hipster destination in the country.

I also had the slightly worrying experience of having to hand the car over for valet parking. As I surrendered the keys, I nervously uttered, "It's a manual", half-expecting the car to come back without a working gearbox. Well, I'm pleased to report, dear reader, that the car survived. Once again, having a manual gearbox seems like a pretty good security feature for a car over here: your average car thief just doesn't know how to make a manual car move.

We returned home late on Sunday having had a really good break, and got a very different feeling for how the early days of immigration to California made it what it is today. And I'm still planning that trans-continental train trip...