Sheltering in Sacramento

We haven’t added a new post in four months so it seemed time to provide an update. We haven’t been able to travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic so we have been staying in and around Sacramento, California, since late July. We don’t go out much where we would encounter other people indoors, just grocery shopping about once a week and trips to medical appointments. But outdoors we enjoy daily walks, a good opportunity to get out for a while and to keep up with our exercise. Otherwise our days are taken up by reading, cooking, watching TV, keeping up with the news, and (for Carrie) knitting. To deal with our wanderlust, we have discovered several YouTube channels that just walk around places where we have previously traveled, like Paris, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh. They are current videos and the deserted streets due to the pandemic are eerie.

We spent the late summer and early fall in a house near Carmichael, a semi-rural area in Sacramento’s eastern suburbs. The area was quiet and safe for our daily walks, and there were about two dozen wild turkeys that roamed the neighborhood. We would see them every day, sometimes pecking around in our front yard. It was also a short drive to the American River Parkway, a bikeway and pedestrian path that goes along the river for 32 miles to the east of Sacramento. The house that we rented had a backyard pool which was great on hot summer days. We were able to use the pool through mid-October. The photo gallery below shows a few sights we encountered around Sacramento. Click on the first photo in each block to view the slideshow.

We are spending the holiday season in a beautiful little guesthouse out in the country between Davis and Winters, California. There is farmland all around and it is very serene. We are a short drive from Woodland, where we lived for many years, and we have enjoyed walks around our old neighborhood. We had hoped to host Andy and his girlfriend for Thanksgiving and Christmas but instead we are heeding the recommendations of the health professionals and spending the holidays alone, taking full advantage of Zoom when we can. We visited Andy briefly outside his building on Thanksgiving morning but we came home and had our feast by ourselves. We cheated and had a Costco chicken instead of cooking a turkey, and it was delicious! Here’s wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday season.