{"id":10482,"date":"2016-12-27T20:47:17","date_gmt":"2016-12-28T04:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/?p=10482"},"modified":"2016-12-28T11:27:55","modified_gmt":"2016-12-28T19:27:55","slug":"man-trip-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2016\/12\/27\/man-trip-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Trip, 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most years, I started this year’s post-Christmas man trip<\/a> with no real destination in mind. Since we don’t get much time together anymore it seemed like a good idea to spend the start of the trip with my brother, and on the way to his place I stopped to see the birds at the Cosumnes River Preserve<\/a>. Upon arriving I discovered that all of my camera batteries were dead; the cranes flying low overhead had a mocking tone to their calls.<\/p>\n

This morning after departing Sacramento I pointed the car towards the mountains and did some exploring in Gold County<\/a>, one of the only parts of California I haven’t really wandered around in. The route began with a visit to Placerville, which is home to the oldest continually-operated hardware store west of the Mississippi; it’s actually cooler than it sounds, and I spent a while admiring the old-timey bins and beams and such. From there I meandered down to Murphys, taking in the rolling hills and small town scenery along the way. After a lunch in the historic Murphys Hotel<\/a> I almost booked a room so I could spend a night in a building built in the 1850s, but instead decided to get a nature fix and headed up to Big Trees State Park<\/a> to see sequoias in the snow, since snow obviously makes giant trees even better. While continuing along Highway 49 I passed a bizarre group of buildings, and sensing that the universe wanted me to stop I spent a short time exploring Columbia State Historic Park<\/a>, which has a super-weird Williamsburg-wannabe-in-the-middle-of-nowhere vibe. I left the place almost as confused about it as when I arrived, but later learned that the state bought the town in the 1940s and now runs it as a living museum. From there it was on to Merced, where I’ll be making the seemingly annual pilgrimage to see the birds at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge tomorrow morning at sunrise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like most years, I started this year’s post-Christmas man trip with no real destination in mind. Since we don’t get much time together anymore it seemed like a good idea to spend the start of the trip with my brother, and on the way to his place I stopped to see the birds at the … Continue reading “Man Trip, 2016”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-10482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-man-trip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10482"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10515,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10482\/revisions\/10515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}