I lived just north of there from the 70s to early 80s...my 11 acres was 30 miles north of Nevada City....lot of art, music and all in the county there. Great rivers....and no neon signs or strip malls....all mom and pop shops. Gaslight street lamps...beautiful area....after my divorce I leased an 11 bedroom victorian on Broad St there and rented rooms.....that was a great time of my life
Used to be an incredible blues club in old town Sac....I think it was called the Club 88 or something like that...saw Robert Cray there before he was famousIt might be a little chilly still in March, but a 1/2 day rental of a houseboat to putter around either Shasta Lake or Whiskeytown Lake (just west of Redding) is quite nice.
Hwy 299 from I5 to 101 is a great drive. Halfway to Eureka is a cute old gold mining town called Weaverville. At the west end of the drive, Lufenholtz Beach near Arcata is gorgeous, and the little fish pace at the end of the pier is delicious. Arcata is a fun little college town.
And of course, the drive south down Hwy 1 is a world-class event.
I lived in Sacramento way too long and even so, there is little threre that I would recommend.
1. The Redwoods;
Yosemite closed on Dec 7th...my son just worked the power lines there and said it looks like a war zone....I think people have fond memories but our parks got pretty wiped out in the last two summer forest fire seasons...our parks in the west are not in traveling or visiting conditiona as is...even the road from Bend to Eugene looks like a war zone....logs piled on the mountainsides and burned out. We lost a ton of Redwood trees....gone for good..many of those big ones you drove through in Northern Cal are no longer there..
Oh crap, I think the redwoods are the most beautiful sights on Earth. I love to look at them more than the Grand Canyon, Vista House on a clear summer day or Yellowstone. They are or were the most beautiful thing in North or South America, perhaps in the world. Some redwoods were here when Christ was born.
I have one near the entrance to my driveway...it's healthy and doing well...breaks my heart that those ancient trees I saw as a 10 year old in 1964 for the first time are gone....nature will bounce back but those old majestic trees were special
When I was 8 months old and our family was relocating from Atlanta, Decatur, Georgia to Oswego, Oregon we drove through the redwoods and actually drove our car through a redwood tree that had a gap bored out that was big enough for the car but smaller than the diameter of the base of the tree. Yes, it was still a living tree. I think it finally got destroyed by a lightening strike 10 or 20 years ago. When I got married the first time sometime in June of 1971 we drove to San Francisco and I once again drove through that tree.
