We’re visiting our son at a high-school leadership conference in Sacramento this weekend. I bought the Sunday edition of The New York Times and was reading it in our hotel room — looking out across the Capitol building and the skyline — and lo and behold there’s a full-page article titled “36 Hours in Sacramento.” Ha!
It begins: “Striking architecture, lush vegetation and a lively cultural scene help entice visitors to California’s often overlooked capital.” The online version is here.
It goes on: “Unlike California’s glittering, glamorous coastal cities, Sacramento’s location in the Central Valley gives it an earnest, small-town affect and a welcome lack of pretension.”
I agreed with most of the suggestions. For example, “The Crocker is the city’s must-see institution, but make your first stop the smaller California Museum ($9), which is based at the State Archives and is home to the California Hall of Fame, which, besides celebrating famous Californians, offers an overview of the state’s history from the Spanish missions era to Japanese internment during World War II, indigenous peoples to Hollywood’s Red Scare.”
Or ” Shady Lady Saloon may be Sacramento’s sexiest cocktail bar,” and “grab coffee at Temple Coffee Roasters, a highfalutin caffeine palace that opened its grandest location — which includes a floor hand-laid with 500,000 pennies — in 2016 in an 1880s building in the trendy Midtown neighborhood.”
The timing of this article, coinciding with a stay in Sacramento, reminded me of another occasion a few years ago: We were reading the Sunday New York Times at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, and I noticed a writeup in the wedding section. It was about a couple whose wedding had occurred in the garden the night before that was right next to where our historic cottage was located. We saw the bride and groom at breakfast. What a coincidence!
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