Travels in the 2nd half

Why, you may ask, is Sacramento the capital of California? Los Angeles is a bigger city, and San Francisco is much more interesting. To find the answer we have to go back to the 1840’s, before California was a state, before it was even part of the United States. John Augustus Sutter , born in Germany and spent his life moving around different places in North America. California was a province of Mexico, and its regional government was based in the town of Monterey. In 1838 Sutter came to the provincial office and requested permission to create a settlement at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in California’s Central Valley.  Frank Buchser [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons   In 1839 he began construction on the settlement of New Helvetia (New Switzerland). The first thing he built was a fort, to house his private army, act as trading post, and provide protection for settlers. When construction was completed in 1841 he was grante...

Writing this blog has been a chance for me to grow. My confidence in my photography and my writing has been increased during the two-and-a-half years that I have been doing this. In fact, writing this blog has given me a chance to expand my horizons, and to try different forms of writing. Traveling can inspire many things. It has gotten me to go beyond just writing travel guides, and to attempt some fiction and poetry. Here is some of what I have produced. The Lion’s Dream I was walking through the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and I saw Henrí Rousseau’s painting The Dream . Rousseau (1844-1910) was a self-taught painter during the post-impressionist era. His work is considered Naïve or Primitive. The Dream is almost surreal, with its positioning of a nude woman reclining on a day bed in a jungle. While Rousseau has written about the dream being the woman’s dream, my attention was captured by the two lions whose faces are in the center of the...