Sacramento and surroundings

Our young ladies Susan and Meike made these three days here a shopping marathon while my sister and I discovered Sacramento with the Capitol, the cathedral, the museum about Native Americans, and Folsam's old town and prison.
Entering the Capitol was like going through the control on the airport - but surprisingly without passport or ID control. If you want to visit the Bundestag in Berlin or the Landtag in Stuttgart or the European Parliament you first have to send an application or to be invited by a member of parliament.
Here we just went in.

The prison on the other hand was intimidating and depressing. So many have died in there and couldn't even leave after death. Even their graves behind high walls... In Germany life sentence means 25 years at most, but here it's different. What may life be like knowing there's no way out?








Tonight Uschi wanted to show us the old town of Elk Grove. But that wasn't so easy, she didn't find it. We drove around this endless scenery for about half hour until we came into one street that was indeed a bit narrower and the houses were a bit older. All in all perhaps a quarter mile. I didn't expect to find an old town, but I expected the town to have something like a center, with the city hall, post office, market place, some cafés, I don't know, 160.000 people just spread out in their neat little houses or big villas, their gated communities, the broad boulevards, unbuilt-on areas in between and of course shopping centers, seems strange to me.

Tomorrow morning we are going back to San Francisco. We'll have two full days there and on the third we "hope" to leave, always stand-by.

I'm not looking forward to go from 97 F (36° C) to 50 F (10° C), from vacation to work, from carelessness to everyday worries.