Day 19, January 24, Sacramento, California

          We left the hotel at 7:30 and drove to Sacramento and area for the day. Highway 50 was not too busy in our direction, but going the opposite way a steady stream of cars filled four lanes for the whole drive to Sacramento. Our driver Shawn says people will commute from Sacramento all the way to Silicon Valley south of San Francisco. It must take them three hours each way. To improve productivity and relieve some congestion on the roads, many tech-sector employees are working from home two days a week, Shawn says.

          We met with a few people to talk about agriculture and its importance to California. Agriculture is the largest industry in the state, generating $36 billion in revenue. Milk is the top commodity, followed by wine grapes, then dozens and dozens of other crops and livestock. While we were at the State Capitol, Paul Somerhausen, who is with the State Senate office of international relations, took us for a tour of the building. We saw Arnold Schwarzenegger's office. He has his name  in big gold letters above his office door, by his request. No other governor has had that feature. Paul says Schwarzenegger is surprisingly short, at less than six feet. We didn't get to see for ourselves, but we did take pictures with the guards in front of his office.

          Our last stop of the day was at Robert Mondavi's Woodbridge winery near Lodi (pronounced "Low-dye") in the flat and fertile San Joaquin Valley. This is no boutique shop. It churns out 15 million cases a year, with a fully mechanized and massive bottling room. I bought a bottle of "Old Vine Zinfandel" made from grapes from vines planted in the 1890s.

          California has about 500,000 acres of vineyards, compared to about two million in France and about the same in Spain. California grape growers actually ripped up about 100,000 acres of vines in the past couple years because a big crop in 2005 took the bottom out of the market. Many of those acres have been switched over to almonds. The problem with trees and vines is that they take years to get into production, so you have to guess the market well in advance. Grape vines take three to five years before they produce, while almond trees take seven years.

          We had a long drive back to San Francisco. It was raining and dark by the time we returned. We crossed over the Bay Bridge, which to me is more spectacular than the Golden Gate Bridge. The Bay Bridge has 10 lanes, with the five eastbound lanes on the bottom level and five westbound lanes on top. It must be three miles long, connecting the blue collar city of Oakland with the busy towers of San Francisco. At 6:15, traffic was bumper to bumper heading INTO San Francisco, but the slow pace gave me a good look at the evening skyline.

          A tidbit: As we exited the bridge, I noticed the price of gas — $3.75 per gallon. It was $3.35 in Sacramento, and $2.80 or so in Kansas City. Gas stations must have to charge extra in San Francisco just to pay for their real estate.

Supper...

          We went to a restaurant called Bacar. It was near the corner of Brannan and Third St., in what seemed like a warehouse district. AT&T Park, where Barry Bonds and the Giants play, is near here. We took a cab because it was raining a bit. The ride was only $6. (Our hotel, by the way, is the Hotel Nikko on the corner of Mason and O'Farrell. I'm giving you these streets in case you like to look up places on a map. I like the hotel and would stay here again. Steve from PEI finds the ambiance too cold. The foyer is tall, wide and all white marble.)

          Bacar was also cold. Everywhere we go we get ribbed about our weather, but at least our restaurants are warm. We were 80 feet from the front door, but every time that door open we got a gale of cold damp air. Steve put his foot down and got us moved to a slightly warmer spot upstairs.

          I had four oysters, oxtail minestrone soup and a small pizza. The oysters were the highlight, not because they were delicious but because they were different. I might have had raw oysters once in my life. They are served in the half-shell on a bed of ice. You tip the shell to your mouth and suck the meat out. It's salty and slightly fishy with a soft texture. I ordered the oxtail soup hoping to get a cross section of tail, with the meat around the cord. Instead the meat was cut up in small pieces, but it was a great soup anyway. The pizza was super dull so there's no point talking about it.

          One neat thing about San Francisco restaurants is that you can order a "flight" of wine. You get two-ounce glasses of four different wines, and the restaurant picks the mix for you. The catch is that these flights are expensive. Anywhere else you could get three or four full glasses of wine for the same price.

We decided to walk back to the hotel. It only took 10 or 15 minutes, and with a group I felt safe.