Lincoln Highway Postcards

I meet Bob and Jarrett at 8 am, and it’s still a bit foggy outside. I explain that I’m going to skip breakfast, maybe grab a donut and coffee in the office, and work in my room for a while on this blog.  Blogging is a new job on the road, and I’m trying to figure out how to […]

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We had booked rooms for tonight in the Pacific Heights Inn, a convenient non-chain old-style motel on Union Street where we’d stayed in San Francisco twelve years ago while making our first two PBS programs: “An Ice Cream Show” and “Shore Things.” Bob had written it down because it was so unusual to find such […]

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We drive slowly uphill into Lincoln Park. The twilight is fading fast. It’s misty and foggy. We see people playing golf, walking in the park, we assume we’ll drive up to the top of this hill and easily find the concrete marker that proclaims this as the official end of […]

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OK. We drive the last few blocks of California Street, heading directly west, (starting to smell the Pacific?) counting the cross streets till we get to 32nd Avenue. It’s a stately and impressive residential neighborhood. And 32nd makes a T when it gets to El Camino del Mar.
We turn left and […]

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The fastest, most direct route from Sacramento to San Francisco would be along I-80 past Davis and Vacaville, through Vallejo and Berkeley to the Bay Bridge, a route that Butko identifies primarily as “3rd Generation” Lincoln Highway. We decide we will be historic for one last time and follow the path (if not the pavement) […]

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It’s hot and nearly two-thirty in the afternoon when we climb back into the van at the California capitol building, and I say, “If we’re going to eat lunch, we have to do it now.”
I noticed some signs for Old Sacramento, and I suggest that there may be some interesting eateries there. Bob says there […]

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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, […]

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Bob and I meet for breakfast at the casino’s coffee shop. Jarrett is editing the video clip we worked on last night, so he stays in his room and misses the granola-yogurt- fresh-fruit bar that he would truly appreciate. It was a Jarrett-friendly breakfast.
We all want to be ready for this day. California, here we […]

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It’s already dark when we get to the outskirts of Reno and try to find the old Lincoln Highway route into town.
Thanks to a brusk Asian cop in a gas station, we get onto Prater Way, turn left, and after a while, it becomes Fourth Street in Reno. For a while, we start to […]

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Several miles later we stop in the wee town of Hazen for gas and a pee at the Hazen Market, an old canopy gas station. Jarrett’s middle name is “Hazen” so he’s happy to be stopping here in such a well named Nevada town, and this independent station’s a wonderful old place, undoubtedly another story […]

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