Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
GETTING AROUND THE CENTRAL VALLEY
Although the Central Valley's main artery is connected by bus and Amtrak, much of the
region is best traveled by car. The main routes through are Hwy 99 and I-5. I-80 meets
Hwy 99 in Sacramento, and I-5 meets Hwy 99 south of Bakersfield.
Amtrak
also inter-
sects the state with two lines - the San Joaquinroute through the Central Valley and the
Pacific Surflinerbetween the Central Coast and San Diego. The San Joaquinservice
stops in just about every tourist destination.
Greyhound
stops in most Central Valley
towns and cities.
The Central Valley has lots of long, straight byways for those making the trip on bikes,
and the
American River Parkway
is a veritable human-powered expressway for com-
muters between Downtown Sacramento and Auburn.
Still, the transportation talk in the Central Valley these days is all about the high-speed
rail. California voters gave the green light to build a network of super-fast trains connect-
ing San Francisco and Los Angeles at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour (making the trip
just over 2½ hours) by 2029.
The total price tag is a whopping $68 billion, and there are legal hurdles yet, but if
everything clears, the first stage will be very humble - a 29-mile track connecting two tiny
farm towns on either side of Fresno by 2017.
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta
The Sacramento Delta is a sprawling web of waterways and one-stoplight towns plucked
out of the 1930s. On weekends, locals gun powerboats on glassy waterways and cruise the
winding levy roads. This wetland area encompasses a huge swath of the state - from the
San Francisco Bay to Sacramento, and all the way south to Stockton. Here the Sacramento
and San Joaquin Rivers converge to drain into the San Francisco Bay. If you have the time
to smell the grassy Delta breezes on the slow route between San Francisco and Sacra-
mento, travel the iron bridges of winding Hwy 160, which lazily makes its way past rice
fields, vast orchards, sandy swimming banks and little towns with long histories.
The town of Locke is the most fascinating, built by the Chinese who also built the
levees that ended perpetual flooding and allowed agriculture to flourish here. After a mali-
cious fire wiped out the settlement in 1912, a group approached land baron George Locke
