Often when tooling along what-you-might-call the Lincoln Highway today, you can choose to follow the exact oldest possible route, searching out little pieces of roadway that were once the highway, or you can just follow the old highway’s basic path, taking advantage of interstates and bypasses and high-speed travel. While descending from the Donner Pass, we have a chance to hop on I-80, the basic path of least resistance, and we take it.
Jarrett is driving, Bob is sitting in the passenger seat with the camera on his lap, occasionally grabbing a shot of California traffic or an unusual landscape. I’m in the back, trying to keep an eye on the road and the territory we’re crossing, all the while reading and trying to figure out what we’re missing as exit signs fly by.
This is Gold Rush country. This is where, in a cavern in a canyon, excavating for a mine, dwelt a miner, forty-niner and his daughter Clementine. We were dreadful sorry that we had to just grab high speed glimpses of the area as we zipped by.
Colfax, Weimar, Auburn, Newcastle, Penryn, Loomis, Rocklin, Roseville, all are just signs along the interstate or mentions in Butko’s book. We can’t go in search of California stories today.
It’s 1:30 or so by the time we get to the Sacramento area, and rather than even try to find remnants of the Lincoln, we decide simply to follow signs for the capitol building. There’s one line in Butko that says, “The Lincoln Highway took drivers right to the state capitol,” so we decide we’ll take a look, grab a shot and continue on our way.
Of course, finding even a big domed capitol building is not easy in an unfamiliar city, and we get lost because of one-way streets and missed signs, but finally we are just across from the state capitol, and there’s a perfect parking space with time on the meter, so out come the cameras, the tripod, and the three of us.
There’s a rose garden very near our parking space, and it allows us to frame the capitol in some postcard-like shots. We are now purely tourists on the Lincoln Highway, and we tourists still stop to see and take snapshots of grand governmental buildings. But this being August 2007, nearing the end of the fourth year in the Schwarzenegger administration, we obviously wouldn’t mind a cameo appearance by the governor. Could we be so lucky? Ah, the many possible scenarios! Perhaps we’d see him leaving one of the beautiful buildings beside us and then watch him strolling over to the capitol itself? The Terminator returns to work after a quick lunch?
No such luck.
We get a few frames, make a video postcard (watch it), pack back into the van and consider grabbing some lunch before getting back on the interstate.