Sacramento!

Ronny and I took a little getaway to California last week through the weekend. Our main purpose for going to California was to attend our college friend's wedding. But we decided to go out a few days early, visit Sacramento and my grad school friend, Janet, then drive through wine country on our way north to the wedding.

I'll spread out the pictures in a few posts, so this is just about our time in Sacramento.

We arrived in Sac late on Wednesday night and stayed downtown right across from the State Capitol. It had a beautiful rose garden and park surrounding it.

We saw our first orange tree...

And we visited inside the Capitol building. This is the Governor's office and former Governor Schwarzenegger donated the bronze bear.

 

Then we walked down to Old Sacramento - a bustling part of the city during the '49 gold rush and the '50 land rush. Interesting fact - because this part of the city was built right next to the river and flooded, they raised the street and made all of the second floors the main floors.

A man was shooting a film! Ronny thought he recognized him but I didn't. :)

Then we visited the California State Railroad Museum. It had a ton of real trains from the days of settling the west and the gold rush and land rush. It was quite the site to see how massive they were and to read all of the history surrounding that time period.

This cute little ol' guy gave us a great tour.

This diesel locomotive was the largest!! It weighed over 165,000 tons and the wheels were taller than me.

  

It was a fun little history tour and then we had a nice, long walk back to the hotel. We had checked our bags with the concierge at the hotel as we knew we wouldn't be back by checkout time, and unfortunately, our bags were gone. To make a very LONG and frustrating story short, they sent them on a tour bus with a big group of Europeans on their way to Sonoma - so much for matching up the luggage tags! They weren't found until 11 am the following morning - but we had a nice evening with my friend Janet, who I'll blog about next!