Our motel was the Rio Sands, on Highway 12 in Rio Vista, almost to the drawbridge. We checked in shortly before six. The place was practically empty, but it is January. I have the feeling that come summer, with fishing and boating season, it’s hard to get a room in this motel unless you reserve well in advance. The place is older( but they do have wireless). The room was quite large, with an alcove that had a mini-fridge with a microwave stacked on top of it, a bench to put a suitcase on, and a nightlight powerful enough to signal airplanes. The bathroom window opened onto a backyard of either a house or the kitchenette apartment the motel advertises. Later, while Lillian and I were watching Grimm, we would hear the rain.
(When we checked in, I asked the clerk if he could recommend a good place for breakfast. “I usually don’t get up that early,” he said.)
The next morning we could look out our window and see blue skies. We walked two blocks to the river and took pictures of the river and the two dredges that are moored along the shoreline. Everything looked blue and shiny, and then, two minutes later, it was raining. Then it stopped. I could look up and see a cloud overhead, get rained on, watch it move on and the rain stop; the very definition of “scattered showers.”
Rio Vista has been around since 1858. According to the Chamber of Commerce website and Wikipedia, it used to be at the entrance to Cache Slough. After catastrophic flooding drove them out, they moved up to the location the town holds now. In the 1920s and 30s, Rio Vista was the stopover for people on their way between Sacramento, the state capital, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They also worked the natural gas deposits they discovered in 1936.
When you head east on Highway 12, outside of Fairfield, you start seeing rows of white wind turbines. They’re tall, with large rotors that revolve in a stately manner. In the spring, the fields they stand in are bright green, and in summer you’ll see herds of cows or flocks of sheep grazing. There are hundreds of turbines. From Rio Vista, if you stand near the Sacramento River and look south toward Main Street, you can see the top half of the rotors majestically turning like time-lapsed clock hands. This “wind farm” (I might call it a plantation) has about 760 turbines. It’s hard to get a good picture of a wind turbine when you are on a central highway, but from the Western Railway Museum, which we visited later, we got some great shots.
As we were walking, the “scattered showers” became less scattered and a little more like outright rain. We went down to Main Street, which has some great buildings from the 1920s. I accosted a man who was walking to his car and asked if he knew a good breakfast place. He recommended Tortilla Flats, which he said was back on the highway. Lillian employed her iPhone and found the location, so we checked out and drove about half a mile to the restaurant. Many thanks to our anonymous Man-on-the-Street guide! The place was cheerfully decorated with Mexican-themed things and SF 49er paraphernalia. Our chipper and friendly waitress told us the specials. The menu is huge, and mostly (here’s a surprise) Tex-Mex themed. We each ordered a Mexican hot chocolate. Lillian had the special omelete and I ordered chiliquiles. First of all, the plates were huge! We both got boxes and brought some home. The food was hot, nicely spiced for gringas, meaning plenty of flavor and not too much heat. Some people love heat and I’m sure they are used to making the food more spicy. I went up the get change at the counter and got a look at their efficient, sparkling clean kitchen. It turns out that this is Tortilla Flats 3, and the original is in South San Francisco, the second one in Chico.
I should mention that it had stopped raining and the wind had tattered the clouds, and we had blue skies all the way to the Train Museum.