Day 17 - Fire Must Be Our Theme This Trip

Day 17 - Yuba City to Sacramento

Our route out of town took us past St. Isidore's again. We hadn't noticed these beautiful outdoor Stations of the Cross last night as they were on the other side of the church.

Rolling down the Garden Highway.

Following the Feather River. They were working on the levee for miles.

More walnuts. This is a good example of the graft between the black walnut root stock and the English walnut crown that allows walnuts to thrive here. One of the people we talked to earlier said that almost all of the walnuts we've been seeing are exported.

Now we are on Highway 99. These clouds of birds kept us entertained and distracted us from the traffic noise.

Wow! Now we have a whole lane of brand new asphalt to outrselves.

They really, really mean it too. These 12 inch deep cracks were about every  80 feet all the way across this bridge.

But we didn't have to worry about being in the way while taking pictures of the river.

Feather River

Our lovely snack lunch spot.

We  are riding on the Levee Road, field on one side.....

......wetlands on the other with lots of birds.

Donna has been trying to get a picture of a great blue heron after startling one 3 days ago. This is as close as she gets after seeing 5 of them in the last 5 miles.

Sacramento Northern Bike Trail

Lunch #2 in Rio Linda

Look closely.....she is "quilting" the mural.

The levee road was good but now we have shade. It is in the mid 90's again today which is hot even for the Central Valley in October. It isn't helping their drought either. It was also a good way to make our way through the suburbs.

Aw shucks. We are only about 4 miles from our destination and it looked like the trail was going to take us almost all the way to our motel. Now we have to do a little mountain biking to drop down to the road below.

And this is what we found when we reached pavement again. A biker headed the other direction told us to call 911 if we had a phone and so that is what we did. Being from out of town made for an interesting conversation with the dispatcher. It blew up a little just after Donna hung up and we were wondering how the electronics for the cell tower were doing.

We stuck around to watch. A total of 4 fire engines showed up and they had it under control in short order. The really heavy black smoke we had seen when it really got hot was from some tires laying in the grass.

The magic of water.

Took some navigation through this section as several trails intersected.

But we found the bridge that crossed the American River and official Sacramento is on the other side.

What an interesting day! Tomorrow we are going to play tourist in the capital.