The weekend following Easter we drove up to Sacramento for a home school field trip to see where California's Gold Rush began. We started at John Sutter's fort in the heart of Sacramento. Our tour guide dressed up as a trapper and showed the kids furs, traps, old guns, and taught them to start a fire with flint and steel and twine. Aiden and Caleb came home with pieces of flint as souvenirs (they want to master that technique at home). They had a living history day at the fort with merchants dressed in period costume selling their wares and covered wagons and old brick ovens. We went inside an old jail cell. It was stinky and damp and dirty and very small. We then went to the Capitol building. The grounds were beautiful with many different kinds of trees, rose gardens, hedge sculptures, etc. The building itself was really lovely too with very ornate architecture inside the Senate and Assembly rooms. No wonder California has such a deficit! We stayed the night at my cousin's house and we had a very informal birthday celebration for Liam after dinner. The next morning, we went into the foothills to Coloma which was where gold was first discovered and most of the gold was found between 1848 and 1849. A replica of Sutter's mill is there next to the American River. Caleb and I really loved the country up there with lots of oaks and rolling hills. We then ended in Old Sacramento to visit where the Pony Express ended their route and see an old one-room school house. We also went to see the Railroad Museum, but we ran out of time and did not see much in there. That museum is supposed to be one of the best or even the best train museum in the country. We will definitely need to take that trip again when Liam is old enough to learn the history behind it. We had a blast and it was nice to get away from mowing and the weeds and day-to-day at home.
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