Customer Reviews

Day Trips: Roaming the Backroads of Northern California

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Two years ago I took my first vacation all by myself. I had a brand new car, a little money, and a lot of time. I found this book while browsing and bought it to take it on my vacation. Each night, I selected a different trip for the next day, highlighted the route, and studied the points of interest I'd be most interested in taking. This small amount of planning gave me great confidence to strike out alone on my vacation.

One year ago, I took a similar vacation, this time with a very special friend. We repeated some of my favorite trips of the previous year and we planned a few new ones. Again, we would spend the evening marking maps and studying points of interest.

"Roaming the Backroads" was so useful on these two trips because the author gave maps, historical information and points of interest along the way. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to explore Northern California and who wants to get off the major highways to do it. Now the book lives on my coffee table and we still pick it up to plan a day trip or to remind ourselves of the pleasures of past trips.

This is a pretty good book for finding interesting off-the-beaten-path places, but the title is very misleading. To me, "Northern California" means San Francisco to the Oregon state line. In fact, all of the tours are clustered around San Francisco or Sacramento. There's nothing north of Stewart's Point, which leaves a gap of almost two hundred miles to the Oregon state line. If the title had been more accurate, I probably would not have bought the book, since I was most interested in areas north of San Francisco.

This book is so old it's more like a history book than a guide book. I don't think the Bay Area looks like this anymore. Fortunately, I'm a historical buff and a big fan of old photographs, so I enjoy looking it over.