Day 6 of our Amtrak Rail-Pass trip

Wednesday January 20th

We arrived at the Sacramento Amtrak station at 6:30 am and got cleaned up in the relatively spacious restroom (compared to the train's). Cousin Doug who lives in nearby Stockton California was going to pick us up at 7:30 am to give us time to comb our hair and wash our faces since we hadn't had a shower yet. It didn't take us long and we were hanging out waiting and asked some questions about where we would catch our next train. During the process we found out they had baggage storage available even though the Amtrak website didn't show it. The station was going through a remodeling and the new station will be much larger with a lot more amenities. Had we known, we would have planned to store our larger bag at the station like we did in Seattle but we didn't have time to repack so we just took them with us since Doug had room in the car.

 Doug picked us up and we stopped by a MickyDs to grab some coffee and a biscuit before our tour of the day. Doug is the ultimate tour guide for this area and he gave us the choices and we all agreed to go look at some Giant Redwood trees cause Shawn had never seen any. On the way towards Arnold CA where Big Tree State Park is located we drove through miles and miles of vineyards. Seems the Stockton area is the largest wine-grape producer in the state even though Napa gets all the tourists. Next along the ride was a stop at Angel's Camp where Mark Twain's Frog Jumping story took place. Since then they have held a Frog Jumping contest each year and have Bronze plaques in each square of the sidewalks immortalizing the winning Frog for that year and his distance. I took a picture of the shortest and longest jumps.

From the Frogs it was a short "jump/hop" to the mountains and the trees. We spent about 2 hours wondering around in the snow looking at the various trees and reading the history of the early settlers and tourists that had been there before us.

Since we were in the Giant mode after the Giant Redwood Trees we figured we'd stop at Giant Burger for lunch.

After lunch we headed back to Sacramento so we could stop by the AirBNB to check in and make sure we didn't have any surprises later after dinner and beers. The AirBNB was easy to find and Chris met me at the door and we did a quick tour and he told me he would be there when we got back but would let me have a key just in case. 

Our Sacramento AirBNB

From there we headed to Sacramento's "Old Town" where we had planned to meet Zach & Georgia (nephew & his wife) for dinner. Since we really didn't have a hard plan regarding location we found a nice place that was quiet where we could actually have conversation during dinner. Besides, how can you go wrong at a place called "Fat City"? Doug and I had beers while Shawn maintained a designated driver status;-)

When Zach & Georgia showed up the conversation really got going. None of us had seen each other for any time in years. Doug lives out here on the left coast and works with his son & law and daughter at a family chemical business, Zach is a U2 pilot/officer in the Air Force. Georgia is  originally from Brazil studying mechanical engineering and Shawn and I were doing an Amtrak Rail Pass trip. You can bet there was no shortage of conversation topics!

We didn't stay out too late cause some had to work the following day and some of us had laundry to do before catching the next train. We all said our good byes and doug dropped us off at our AirBNB.