Next City: Vallejo, CA / Solany County Fair

Hello again, Adventurers!

The next place in our travels is Vallejo, CA!

Let's point out the obvious (for people in the Solano County/Bay Area) first. Vallejo has a bad reputation for not being a good city. Even when we were talking to others about going to the city for our next trip, we got a lot of jokes about unsavory things located there, and questions about what we could possibly want to see there. 

For those of you who don't live in the area, and may not have heard about Vallejo before, we would just like to make sure that you get a balanced view of the city. Every town has some bad parts, but our job with these trips is to highlight the good things about every city we find. With that said, let's move on :)

Vallejo hosts the Solano County Fair every year. Being new up here, we did not want to miss the chance to see the fair for our county, and we are so glad that we didn't because we got a lot of information for our future trips! More on that later. First, let's look at the map of Vallejo.

The city of Vallejo includes historic Mare Island as well as several parks and hiking trails and natural places to visit. The fairgrounds are across the street from one of the major attractions in Vallejo: Six Flags-Discovery Kingdom. Although it's a great addition to Vallejo, which brings in a lot of commerce and attention to the city, we wanted to focus on the parts that are less well known or overlooked.

That brings us first to the county fair. Growing up in LA county in SoCal, we were used to the big fair there. We still haven't been to one quite so large and all consuming. However, having visited several fairs up here, we both realized the appeal of smaller fairs. It's more about the people who live in the county, and the highlighting those cities. That is the purpose of fairs, but, if like us, you are from SoCal or a large city area, that might not be apparent to you. I still don't remember any of the LA fairs I've ever been to in my life, featuring and celebrating the cities that comprise it.

Solano's fair did a fantastic job of this. Every city was represented (Rio Vista was a bit sad, but the rest were fantastic) and we could really see that the county valued the people who live and work within it.

So, without further ado, please enjoy our pictures/tidbits about the Solano County Fair :)

Second City: Sonoma, CA!

Hello there, Adventurers!

We numbered all the cities that we have (after taking out a few that happened to not be actual cities, and removing SF and Sac because they're just waaaay too big for us to do at the moment) and we have 98 cities yet to visit. We used a random number generator and came up with Sonoma as our next city! We were more than a little happy that it was actually not far to drive to this time.

   

There are a lot of beautiful things to see in Sonoma, including wineries, old town Sonoma, which dates back to the late 1800s, and Mission San Francisco Solano (the last and Northernmost Mission). A little out of the city area is the Jack London Park (we didn't get a chance to go) and the Quarryhill Botanical Gardens (which we did get to visit).

Did you know that when you search for a city on Google maps now, it outlines the city for you? Pretty cool. So prepare to see one of these for the rest of the cities that we do.

 

Destination 1: Brentwood - Day 2

Hello again, fellow adventurers!

A city like Brentwood was just too big to make the Corn Festival the only reason to visit the town. And no, it's not the same Brentwood that OJ Simpson made famous 20 years ago! No, this Brentwood was made known by John Marsh in 1837. He was an East Contra Costa County pioneer who had donated much of his property that would later be developed into the city that we see today.

So how did Brentwood get its name? Well, John Marsh's old stomping grounds was in the County of Essex, England, in a township called Brentwood. Anyways, it took a century until the town was incorporated in 1948. Now, 65 years later, it is home to over 50,000 people and it's pretty diverse too!

 

Destination #1: Brentwood

Hi and welcome, fellow explorers!

We picked our first city, Brentwood, by total accident. We heard a radio ad a few weeks ago on 560 KSFO, which was promoting a corn festival that Brentwood is famous for. It just so happened to be taking place the weekend after we decided to start doing these trips, so the decision was obvious. Technically, we were supposed to draw city names out of a 'hat', but we didn't want to miss this opportunity. So, here is our post about our adventures in Brentwood.

 

Ahoy Fellow Explorers!

This is our first post for our weekly road trips. We will be making our way through a list of 103 towns/cities that lie within a 50 mile radius of our humble abode in Fairfield, CA. We used to do this, sort of, when we were in SoCal, but life got in the way and we only explored one city. But, since then, the idea hasn't left us and now that we are in a completely new area, there's much more to appreciate and to discover.

We found a fun website that will draw a radius around a selected point. Click on the link to make your own map. You can even save the link to your specific map, so that you can find it again later.

For now, we won't list all 103 cities on here because it's quite a few, but we will tag the city names on the posts so you can see them all. Some of the cities are really big (like Sacramento and San Francisco) so we will be looking at them more than one weekend. There are also special events and festivals that we will be making our way to as they come up during the year.

We hope exploring these cities will be as fun for you as it will be for us.

Come along, and let the adventures begin!

<3 Katrina and Jason