Hot!

All good things come to an end they say, and so our time in Inverness was finally over. I was not expecting much on Monday as we drove endlessly and John, well, had difficulties, but it turned out to be a really great place to stay and I left quite refreshed. We took quite a while to pack and clean up, and we pulled out just after 11:00. We probably passed the cleaners as we were coming down the hill. Our destination was the Gold Rush town of Murphys where our friends Donna and George have a home.
Daniel, our trusty GPS, took us around the edge of the Bay Area. I suppose left on my own I would have gone across the Richmond Bridge and gone through Oakland and out to the Central Valley via the 580. Daniel took us over the bridge to Vallejo and through parts of Solano County and the Delta. It was not the most scenic route imaginable, but we ran into no traffic and saw some areas we had never seen before.

Speaking of places we had never seen before, we came across the “city” of Copperopolis as we were starting to enter the foothills. This place has to be the ultimate of faux urban planning. There is no town any place to be seen, but this shopping mall has a fake “Town Hall” in the center of it.

And there is a fake little bandstand in the middle of the fake town square, thankfully lacking a fake Civil War memorial.

Surrounding this ersatz Americana are a bunch of stores and restaurants. What made it all even more bizarre was that it was totally empty. We were just about the only people there. I half expected at any moment to hear Rod Serling intone, “John and John pulled off Highway 4 … and into the Twilight Zone!”

We are in the midst of probably the worst heat wave to hit the Western United States in decades, if not ever, and the temperature as we drove through the Central Valley was well into the triple digits. I hoped as we climbed into the Sierra Nevadas that it would cool down. No such luck. By the time we reached Murphys we had only dropped a degree or two at the most.

Donna has a large house with a great view and a somewhat odd floor plan. But the house has a great feel to it and a fantastic deck. Had it been even a little cooler we would have been happy to have stayed out there and talked all evening.

We waited until after dark, and then we went into the town to get something to eat. Although I have been through the Gold Country many times, I usually have never ventured far from Highway 49 and as a result I had never been in Murphys before. It is probably the cutest of the towns in this part of the state. It is definitely more affluent than places like Angeles Camp or Mokulumne Hill. We found a restaurant with a patio. Donna good naturedly put up with John’s picture snapping.

In the 90 degree heat of the night we walked around and talked.