Trip to the center of California

This last weekend I made a trip to the heart of the California central valley, the Big Valley as it is known. Of course I am talking about Sacramento. The capital city of California is not what you may expect as the center of government of the most populous state and one of the major economic players in the world. Sacramento is actually a laid back place, surrounded by farm land, rice fields and grass lands. Though now a lot of that incredible farm land has been turned into cheep housing developments. It is a waste to build on such fertile farm land but then it is cheep and easy to build on.

Sacramento has and always has had an inferiority complex because of the close proximity to San Francisco. Locals actually think Sacramento has comparable restaurants… Sacramento isn’t a bad town, I have been to many worse places in eastern parts of America, so I can’t complain too much.

Sacramento, this last weekend had one of those typical weekends, some sun and a little clouds, comfortable weather, no rain and some sun. In the summer it can be very hot and uncomfortable, but this time of year it is very pleasant. I just spend a couple of days in town, didn’t do much, had family to deal with. I would have preferred to have been in San Francisco but I will be there soon enough. I put my time in at Sac, now I am free for a few months to not have to worry about going back.

Bang Bang Weekend

This past weekend I accompanied a good friend out of town for a day of target practice. Well it was more like learn to shoot than practice. I myself did not shoot, but my friend wanted to learn for experience mainly for her job. She deals with hunters, as customers, and to gain the respect she needed to be able to say “Yes I have fired guns before”. So her brother in-law said he would help and I tagged along for support. We drove out to an area that is used for target practice and had a few targets to shoot at. A metal target was placed 50 yards out and on the second shot she hit the target. Though it was rainy and I just stood around, I was impressed with her shooting. She hit the target with small and medium caliber shot and really showed she could do it. Now she can look them in the eye and say “Yes I have shot a gun many times”.

Since we were out, we headed up the road a few more miles, after all the shooting, and had a lat lunch/early dinner in a nearby town. We sat and talked and joked, she was happy to have done it but she isn’t going to do it again. It isn’t her thing. Before we stopped for dinner, we walked the main street of town and looked in a few shops. There are only a few blocks of stores but they do have nice little places and some good things.

It was a nice weekend day and even though shooting is not something we would ever do, we both were happy with the results and that she could check this off her list of things to do