Sacramento

American River & Folsom Lake — Cycling, Kayaking & the Historic Powerhouse

The American River drains straight out of the Gold Country and into Sacramento's back door, and its lower reaches around Folsom deliver a full active day barely half an hour from downtown. This loop pairs the flatwater of Lake Natoma and the wide blue of Folsom Lake with two of the finest paved cycling paths in the region — the lakeside American River Parkway and the sculpture-lined Johnny Cash Trail. Between the pedaling and the paddling sits the Folsom Powerhouse, the 1895 hydroelectric plant that first sent alternating current the twenty-two miles to Sacramento and helped prove long-distance power transmission to the world. Old Town Folsom, with its Gold Rush storefronts and Sutter Street saloons, anchors the meal. It is an easy day to scale up or down: a gentle family cruise on the Natoma shoreline or a hard forty-mile out-and-back on the Parkway, all within sight of the water.

Lodi — Old-Vine Zinfandel, a Downtown Mission Revival & Micke Grove Gardens

Forty minutes south of Sacramento, Lodi is one of California's most rewarding and least pretentious wine towns — the self-proclaimed Zinfandel Capital of the World, where gnarled, head-trained vines planted before Prohibition still produce some of the state's most characterful reds. This unhurried single day wanders the sandy-soil vineyards of the Mokelumne River appellation, tasting at family wineries whose century-old vines are worked by the fourth and fifth generations. In between, it slows down in Lodi's handsome Mission Revival downtown — the 1907 Mission Arch, antique shops, and a tasting-room lunch — before an afternoon among the Japanese gardens, oaks, and rose beds of Micke Grove. It's a gentle, glass-in-hand introduction to the flat, fertile country that supplies a fifth of California's wine grapes.

Davis & Woodland — Arboretum Gardens, University Art & Yolo County Heritage

A short hop west across the Yolo Causeway lands you in a pair of towns that trade Sacramento's capital bustle for university culture and agricultural heritage. Davis is a bicycle-obsessed college town where the UC Davis Arboretum threads a 100-acre living museum of gardens along a former oxbow of Putah Creek, and the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art brings bold contemporary work to a striking canopy of aluminum 'beams' on the campus edge. A few minutes north, the Yolo County seat of Woodland preserves one of California's finest streets of Victorian and early-twentieth-century commercial architecture, anchored by the beautifully restored 1896 Opera House. The day closes at the vast Heidrick Ag History Center, whose halls of gleaming antique tractors and harvesters tell the story of the Central Valley's transformation into one of the most productive farm regions on earth.