lacerville is a small town in northern California, about 40 miles southeast of Sacramento. It's not a bad little town, but it's not a place many people visit on purpose. 

First of all, you should know how to pronounce it. It's plAAA-cer-ville.  Long "A," like in "elastic" or "viagra."  Or is it now officially "V1AGRA!" as 90% of my daily spam dubs it, to try and avoid mail filter deletion? Secondly, you should harbor no illusions; Placerville is far from a vacation paradise. It's rural Northern California, and while it's still nicer than most of the rest of the world, it's not all that special, and if not for its close proximity to numerous excellent vineyards, there would be virtually no tourism at all.  My dad certainly wouldn't have been there on a quick vacation, and if he hadn't Malaya and I would not have driven up to hang out with him for the day.

Still, if you want to drink some good wine for free, see some nice vineyards, and experience very small town life without feeling as though the soundtrack to Deliverance should be playing in the background, the towns around Placerville aren't a bad place to visit.

A shot of the pool area at dad's hotel. It was certainly a bright and sunny day.

The painfully-ugly Mexican restaurant next door to the hotel. Primary colors are our friends!  You can click this one to see it full size, though I can't imagine why you would want to.

Perhaps once they have the broadband installed they'll change their sign to say, "Coming soon; computer rentals!" and then you'll have another reason to want to return in future years.  Or not.

First stop after meeting dad at his hotel? A gold mine! There's no gold left, tragically, though you can rent a pan and sift for some in the wooden troughs they've built out front and thrown a few sprinkles of gold flakes into to make it more fun.  We passed.

At the tunnel entrance. You get an idea of the height and darkness inside in this shot. I have no explanation for my facial expression, and yes, Malaya still wants/needs to remain faceless on this website.

Dad and Malaya sharing a smile. A smile and a half, in dad's case. Her shirt says "Shoe Fetish," if you were wondering. 

• Click here to see a close up of the sign above, with the mine's history detailed.

I took a ton of photos from inside the gold mine, but most of them were pretty useless. Well, for the non-geologists out there, at least. I like rock formations though, especially when there are this many different colors and textures. Click this one to see it in a desktop wallpaper size.

• More pretty rocks.

A shot of Malaya and dad in the mine, with some curious blurring caused by me moving the camera after holding down the picture button for about 10 seconds and growing tired of waiting for the LED to focus in the very dim light. It is amazing how much the camera can brighten the image though; you could hardly see your hand in front of your face in the tunnel, but this makes it look bright enough to read in.

A natural light view of the tunnel. This shot is perhaps twice as bright as it was to the naked eye, courtesy of the light meter on the digicam.

Looking up through a fenced off cave shaft. According to the maps, there were half a dozen of these going up and down from the main shaft, but all the rest are blocked off now that the mine is retired and goldless.

This one gives you a better idea of just how dark and gloomy it was inside there. This shot is flash-aided, and I turned the brightness way, way up in Photoshop. I'm not sure why the main tunnel has such pretty and colorful rock walls while the side shafts are black and gray and drab; it's probably something to do with water flow or erosion or the like.

• The mine cart that blocked off this tunnel from the main shaft.

The rear wall of the mine where it just comes to an end. They've left lots of little colorful fuse strings dangling from holes in the wall, which is meant to simulate what it looked like when they were doing actual blasting down there.

The photos on this page are somewhat misleading, since we actually visited half a dozen vineyards (or "grape orchards" as I like to call them just to tweak wine lovers like my father), yet there are hardly any photos of them.  The reason is pretty simple; once you get past the romance of the grape and the potential to get drunk drinking it... it's a big field of plants. Corn on a hill.

Plus with the day so bright and sunny, there wasn't any dramatic lighting or shadows or any of the other props mediocre photographers like myself need to make our work visually-interesting.

A closer view of a vine row. These are wider than usual, for no clear reason. Modern fields planted to allow easier machine harvesting, probably.  They're also very dry, in the hot, late summer, since all the irrigation is drip irrigation that flows down into the earth below the actual plants.

Click this one to see it full size. You can just see the Sierra Nevada mountains in the background, dead center of the shot.

Later in our day's tour we hit this old rock grinding mill. They brought hundreds of tons of rock here in the old days and fed it into huge crushing machines that reduced it to dust from which the gold was removed. Since rocks are heavy and gravity is your friend, they tended to build these things on hillsides.

Here's the side view. I strongly suspect the windows, doors, and rustic wooden fences are all modern additions meant to prettify the original cheap and industrial design. And that they left the trees there in the old days since it would have taken a few dollars more to cut them down, rather than for any aesthetic reasons.

These sinister things are part of the rock crushing mechanism. It's very low tech; a big gear turns the bar that all of those teeth are on, and as they rotate they lift up heavy metal poles, then drop them as the teeth move clear, and the metal simply crashes down into the rock fragments, crushing them to gravel.  They don't operate the big one anymore, but they told us when it was working you could hear it in town, several miles away.  There were about a dozen metal poles and they weighed something like half a ton each.

One of the tiny towns we drove through in the Placerville area. Most were like this, literally 5 or 6 old style buildings on the main street, where the winding two-lane highway slowed from 50 to 20MPH and wove through the businesses, past one street of residential houses, and then back into the wooded hills again.

The best view in town was this shot I took of Malaya, sitting on a park bench outside one of the many closed businesses.

One of the more inexplicable things we saw was an astonishingly-detailed outdoor model railroad set. It was back behind some of the main buildings in one small town, and there had to be 80 or 100 miniature buildings, including houses, bridges, and even this water tank. There was no one there working on it and the train tracks appeared to be blocked by construction in several places, but the quality of work was amazing. That water tank above was maybe a foot tall; the wooden slats it's made from are smaller than popsicle sticks.

Another shot of the model railroad town.  Those houses are smaller than your shoe, and yes, there were dozens of little bonsai-sized trees and bushes around the town, and it was all outdoors and untended; not even fenced off or anything. How some local kids haven't gone out there and stomped it all flat yet I don't know. Perhaps there aren't any local kids, in such a tiny town.  As to who built it all, we have no idea. Some local retired men with plenty of time on their hands?

The last stop of the day was to see these huge mining wheels.  The park was very plain, with two huge wheels in fenced off areas and a small kiosk with a science-fair type information display. There were originally four wheels in a row up the hill, working as you see in the picture. Each one turned, lifting rock fragments up and dumping them into the chute, which slid them down to the base of the next wheel, and so on. There was a huge holding pond on the other side of the hill, where the rock fragments and other mining detritus was dumped to slowly leech their industrial poisons into the ground water.

A low level shot of the wheel. You can see dad walking up the hill to the far right, if you want some scale of the thing. It's about 80 feet tall.

There are two wheels remaining of the original four, but one fell down decades ago. Its broken timbers are still strewn across the concrete foundation in which it once stood. Fenced off for our safety, of course.

Looking down at the one wheel that's still standing. Click it to see it larger; dad and Malaya are visible to the left of the center, through the spokes. Yes, it really is that big.

A sideways view of the standing wheel, with bonus artistic shadow. You can see the hundreds of tiny little wooden slots around the outside that were used to carry the stones up. Small as they look, you could very easily sit in one of those.  Click the shot to see it full sized.

In retrospect, I could have used more vineyard photos and more pics of curious things, photojournalist style, rather than so many so many large scale "Golly! Look at that there thingie!" tourist type shots.  After all, I'm not producing a travel guide or brochure or documentary here -- I'm posting shots on my blog that are interesting to look at and that lend themselves to amusing captions. I'm going for entertainment rather than information, and if some information slips through then I need to try my hardest to be sure it's presented in entertaining fashion.

Summed up the credo for the entire Internet pretty completely there, didn't I?

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.