My Rural Travelogue (XXIII): A California summer on the road

Redwood Coast Transit Schedule, Smith River (Del Norte County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Most of my travel this summer has been road-tripping through parts of the Golden State.  I'm on my third trip of the summer now, to Sonoma County.  The other two have taken me farther afield (meaning farther from my Sacramento County home), first to Del Norte County, the state's farthest northwest reaches and then to Los Angeles via the coast, back through the Central Valley.   All told, these journeys have added up to well over 2,000 miles, many of them on Highway 101.  For this post, I'm using photos of post offices and (meager) public transit systems to illustrate my journeys, though I have included in some earlier posts this summer (here) a wider array of photos from Del Norte County.

On these three trips, I have passed through 25 different counties--nearly half of the state's total.  Specifically, I have traversed some part of the following California counties (in order of my passage, and showing county seats and populations in parentheses): 

U.S. Post Office Smith River (Del Norte) County, California, July 2019
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Trip 1:
Yolo County (population 200,849, Woodland)
Colusa County (21,419, Colusa)
Glenn County (28,122, Willows)

Redwood Coast Transit Bus, Del Norte County, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 

Tehama County (63,463, Red Bluff)
Shasta County (177,223, Redding)
Trinity County (13,786, Weaverville)
Humboldt County (132,646, Eureka)
Del Norte County (28,610, Crescent City)
(then heading south again through Humboldt)
Mendocino County (87,841, Ukiah)
Lake County (64,655, Lakeport)

U.S. Post Office Cambria (San Luis Obispo County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

U.S. Post Office Big Sur (Monterey County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Trip 2:
San Joaquin County (685,306, Stockton)
Stanislaus County (514,453, Modesto)
Merced County (255,793, Merced)
San Benito County (55,269, Hollister)
Monterey County (415,057, Salinas)
San Luis Obispo County (269,637,  San Luis Obispo)
Santa Barbara County (423,895, Santa Barbara)
Ventura County (823,318, Oxnard) 
Los Angeles County (10 million give or take a few, Los Angeles)
(the heading north again through Ventura, SB, SLO...)
Kern County (839,631, Bakersfield), though I just nicked the corner on that one
Kings County (151,366 Hanford)
Fresno County (994,400 Fresno)
then back through Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties to Sacramento.

Trip 3:
Yolo County (see above)
Solano County (413.344, Fairfield) 
Napa County (136,484, Napa)
Sonoma County (483,878, Santa Rosa)

So, of the 25 counties through which I traveled, only 8 are classified as nonmetropolitan (population less than 100,000), and 7 of those 8 are in far northern California.  The 8th is San Benito, between Central and Salinas Valleys.

U.S. Post Office, Los Alamos (Santa Barbara County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

One striking thing about these journeys:  the incredible variety of terrain and climate across the Golden State, from mist-shrouded redwoods to parched rolling hills dotted by chaparral. 

U.S. Post Office Bodega (Sonoma Co)
California (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Then of course, there's farmland from end to end:  orchards, cattle, and row crops including broccoli, strawberries and wine grapes.  (No doubt I've also driven past some cannabis, though I wasn't aware when I did.)

Sonoma Coast Transit Bus, near Bodega Bay, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Decades ago, the Republic of South Africa used the tourism slogan, "A World in One Country."  California could readily go with a similar slogan, "A World in one State."