ADVENTURES CLOSE TO HOME: Placerville Oktoberfest

Our usual and favorite Oktoberfest is ending an era this year. The Phoenix Club, a German cultural club in Anaheim, has a great festival each fall. This is the last year at that location because the nearby Honda Center arena wants that land to expand...which is ironic because the original location of the club was given up so the Honda Center could be built.

The club has plans to move to another location and having their celebration there.

In the meantime, we've found another home for our German fall celebration up in the historic town of Placerville in El Dorado County.

While there are other Oktoberfest celebrations in the Sacramento area...Folsom, Clements, Lake Camanche, and Sacramento itself for starters...this one seems to be the easiest for us.

A couple of years ago, the last Oktoberfest here before Covid was a big mess as the ticket redemption system was a complete fiasco. The manager of the fest finally threw in the towel and said "let everybody in."

This year...the first since Covid...there are no tickets needed. Entrance is free but you need to buy tickets to redeem for beer.

Placerville is a pretty, 40 minute drive from our house and parking was easy to find about a block away from the entrance. We arrived at 2:55pm. The festival starts at 3pm. Pretty little Main Street in downtown is blocked off with booths for beer and food vendors lining the way for three blocks.

One obstacle is that ABC rules won't let them serve beer until 3pm. No big deal but they're also not selling the tickets required for the beer until 3 either, making for a long, slow line at the sale booth. Maybe they could start selling the tickets a half hour early next year to help eliminate that roadblock.

Another one is that the sign at the ticket booth is "$10 for 12 oz. beer, $12 for 20 oz. beer." I ask for a few 20 oz. tickets. 

"OK, a stein and 4 tickets," I'm told.

"No, just 4 tickets, I've got my own stein."

"You are required to buy the stein to get the large tickets," she tells me.

"No where on your sign, posters, or your ads does it say that. I don't want the stein."

It's a battle I'm destined to loose so I buy one stein and 3 tickets (cost me an extra 8 bucks) so we can get on with it. I give the stein to a lady nearby who was happy to have the souvenir.

First stop, Tim's hungry and wants a big pretzel. There you go, Tim.

Next, they're tapping the cermonial keg so we swing over there. With everybody still in line to buy beer tickets, there's only about 10 people here and we know that once tapped, the free flowing beer is allowed to be poured into anybody's mug who is standing there so we get about half a stein of beer for free.

I enjoy I quick drink with the brewmeister and his wife.

Next, I find Letty and Tim, we find a bench to sit at and I stand in line for some very good bratwursts. 

Once the food is in hand, I pass that off to the other two and go stand in another line for beer. After 20 minutes, I get to the stand and...they ran out of beer.

So it's off to another stand where it only takes me 10 minutes to get to the front and get our steins filled.

While we're eating and drinking, a lady comes by with her pet wolf.

Really...it's a wolf. It's only 7 months old so she's pretty lovable and petable with a nice soft coat. I ask her if the wild animal ever presents itself and she says "oh, yeah...that's why we're over here. If we were over in the crowd down the street, she'd go nuts."

Bands play on the stage and people dance in the street. It's getting very crowded so we stand in a couple more lines to finish off our beer tickets, have a little more fun visiting with the other people in the crowd (our German steins are a big hit with everybody) and then call it a night.

The pros of this particular celebration is that it's free to enter (others charge up to $50 just to walk in the door), the location is very pretty and conducive to a party, the people are very friendly, and there's a vast variety of local microbrews served.

The cons are that it gets crowded, there are a lot of lines to stand it, and there are not nearly enough tables and chairs to sit at (many people brought their own folding chairs to sit it, we might do that next time).

Placerville usually has their Oktoberfest on a Saturday at the beginning of October. Check out the website for the Placerville Oktoberfest to see exactly when the next celebration will occur.

Darryl Musick
Clopyright 2021 - All Rights Reserved

THE COCKTAIL HOUR: The Placerville Brewfest

(Note: The Placerville Brewfest has changed to the Motherlode Beer and Music Festival and now takes place at the El Dorado County Fairground in mid-August - Ed)

As a retirement present, I received three VIP passes to the Placerville Brewfest. Placerville an historic Gold Rush city in California, east of Sacramento. It's also the county seat of El Dorado County. The brewfest takes place on the streets of downtown here on a Saturday late in June each year.

The VIP passes get us in an hour early, a large glass for tasting, and a bag to collect swag from the brewers on site. We get a taxi to take us from our hotel so there'll be no inhibitions here tonight...we have four hours  to drink as many samples as we can.

After checking in and getting our wristbands, we on the prowl for brew...

Watch the Video!

It's in the mid 90's today on Main Street. The buildings on either side of us date back to the Gold Rush. In fact, we can drive 30 minutes and stand on the little piece of sand where James Marshall found the nugget that started it all. Today, the gold is liquid. Well, most of it is. Some is red and some of the porters are brown.

We've got three blocks ahead of us, lined with people ready to give us free, ice cold beer.

There are a few big guys here like Sierra Nevada, Deschutes, and Gordon Biersch but the vast majority of the booths are from little, local microbreweries with names like Hangtown, Thin Line, Placerville Brewing, and Amador Brewery.

The best I tasted were the red ales from Placerville Brewing and Campbell Brewing. Hangtown had a very nice Saison and Alamador a very good Kolsch.

There were also a few cider breweries, a mead stand (a little sweet for me), and a high-alcohol kambucha stand called Booch Craft that was very interesting, sweet but dry.

The local homebrew club was also pouring a very good black porter.

Food was provided in samples by Round Table Pizza and the Farm Table Restaurant. Tim liked the bratwurst from farm table. Plus, giant pretzels to hang around your neck while you wandered through all that beer.

See the video, above, where in 12 minutes you can get a very good sense of what it was to be there plus see the gunfight erupt between rival breweries where I get caught in the crossfire.

It was a very fun fest and we just might have to make it an annual tradition here.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2018 - All Rights Reserved

Panning For Gold to Pay For Our Car in the Motherlode

(Please read our Covid 19 Statement first - Ed)  A few months ago, I retired from my day job at the U.S. Department of Justice. A couple of weeks ago, my former boss sent me three tickets for the Placerville Brewfest as a retirement present. Placerville is a small Gold Rush era city about 40 miles due east of Sacramento, California.

I hopped online and got the cheapest room I could find. We just need somewhere to lay our heads while we're here, nothing fancy. We'll be heading a little deeper into the Motherlode after this quick weekend in Placerville.

So we loaded up the van and headed up north. Because we were going to be drinking and because our motel was two miles from the fest, I brought Tim's folding travel chair with us. That way, we could get a taxi from our motel to the festival, indulge all we'd like, and then take the taxi back later. No parking hassles, either.

With stops, it took about 7 hours. We check into the Motherlode Motel which turned out to be a dated, retro hotel but was clean, quiet, and run by a very friendly and accommodating Indian family. The wife even deployed a homemade wooden ramp for us to get over the lip into our room (it wasn't an accessible room, just needed the two queen beds, room for the wheelchair, and to be able to get to the toilet for this trip).

My wife tells me "there's some oil or something on the back door of the van." I go and look and, sure enough, there's a oily sheen there.  I look around but can find nothing. The van was running perfectly on the way up so I chalk it up to some other vehicle leaking something near us as we were on the freeway.

After unpacking, I go to get some take out for dinner.  I notice several oil spots on the ground near our rear passenger side tire.  I look underneath and see that there's a leak near the brake on that side.  I'm thinking good news it's not the differential...that'd be more expensive than brakes.

I check the brake fluid reservoir. It's full.  Maybe it's a very slow leak.

"I've found the source of the oil," I tell my wife about my theory about the brake fluid leak.

We discuss what to do and decide to show up first thing in the morning at the local Les Schwab Tire and Brake shop down the street to have them check it out because it's the only local place we could find that would be open on Saturday.

It's an early morning but we make it right at 8 in the morning only to find there are already 10 people ahead of us. I check the van in. I tell the guy, "wow...I guess I wasn't the only one to try to get here right when you open the door."

"We open at 7:30," he tells me.

"That's not what your web page says. It says 8:00."

"Yeah...we need to fix that."

Van in the shop, we head to the Golden Waffle restaurant next door to eat then take a walk to downtown Placerville to kill the time.

While Letty is in a yarn shop, Tim and I are in the dive bar next door waiting for her. I get a phone call. It's Chris from Les Schwab.

"I checked your van, it's not the breaks. That was axle grease and oil that was leaking. The entire real axle is shot and we need to replace it."

This isn't good. After some back and forth where it was really recommended that I not try to drive it anywhere. If I didn't want them to fix it, they said it needed to be towed. The closest Ford dealer is 30 miles away in Folsom and home is over 350 miles away.

"Can you fix it today?" I ask.

"We can't even get the part until at least Tuesday," he tells me.

"How about the cost?"

"About $2400."

Oh no...this free beer festival got very expensive, very fast. 

Well, you have to do what you have to do sometimes. I call Enterprise to rent a car. After some false starts, I find that the closest office is also in Folsom. I can't find a Lyft or Uber to take me, so I bite the bullet and call Hangtown Taxi where a very nice and competent driver named Simeon dropped Letty and Tim off at the motel and then drove me down to Folsom to pick up the car.

That was another hundred bucks, not including the cost to rent the car.

So, our plan is to go to the festival later today, spend the night, drive home, and come back up next week to get the van and continue the trip. Les Schwab is understanding and will hold my car for me at no extra charge until we can get back.

This is just starting but let's hope the worst of it is behind us.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2018 - All Rights Reserved.

Up Close and Personal with the Motherlode: Gold Mine Touring in Placerville, California

When you're in a wheelchair, there are certain features of geography that are usually off-limits for you...beaches, water sports, caves...so when you do find something that goes against the grain, you jump on it with a vengeance.

We'll do what it takes to make it work if it's even just hinting at being accessible like the time we went zip lining down a Costa Rican volcano with Tim, hiked to the top of the tallest mountain in Tennessee, trekked through an alligator infested swamp in South Carolina, went on an air boat adventure in the Everglades...but this time, it required no effort at all other than an easy 40 minute drive from home.

Here in California's Gold Country, there are hundreds of mines. Most of them long closed and pretty dangerous to explore for anybody. When they were active, none were ever thinking about becoming tourist attractions. Some are open for surface tours only...like the Kennedy Mine in Jackson...and extremely few allow visitors to actually tour the shafts and tunnels. Those that do stress that it is not an adventure for those who are not physically up to going up and down shafts, hiking in the dark over rough and rocky terrain, or having to climb stairs or ladders.

You can imagine my surprise when I found a mine tour, fairly close to home, that welcomed people of all abilities. It's only a 40 minute drive, so we'll give it a shot. If it doesn't work, we're still in a very nice area of the state where we can at least have a picnic and browse the downtown shops of one of the state's great Gold Rush towns.

We'll go up to Placerville and have a little picnic at the park before starting. Our local police chief owns a peach farm down in the central valley town of Linden. He sells them at local farmers markets and also at our town's grocery store. I pick up a couple, plus some string cheese and prosciutto. This will make for a nutritious but not too filling snack to hold us over until we get a big meal when we're done here.

We arrive at Gold Bug Mine and Park, just about a mile north of Highway 50 in Placerville. Handicap parking is easy and right by a large, shaded picnic pavilion so we head in there to have our light meal.

At the gift shop, the lady at the counter points me up a staircase to buy tickets for the mine tour. At the top...especially since I just climbed a flight of stairs...I share my concern with the lady selling tickets that maybe it might not be so accessible.

"Oh no, it's completely accessible. There's a ramp out the back door of the gift shop that will lead you up here and to the mine entrance."

I go back down and the three of us go up that ramp, being careful to stay on the path to avoid the poison oak growing just beyond the handrail. At the top, we go into the ticket office and get fitted with hard hats. It's a requirement for Letty and I, optional for Tim. I'll find out why later.

We pay for our tickets ($9 each today) and the lady guides us into installing an app on our phone. This will be the audio tour when we're in the mine. We connect to the park's wifi and are shown what to do. In the mine, there are numbers on the wall. You tap the corresponding number on the app and a narrator explains that stop on the tour.

The floor has been boarded over or paved and it's a flat journey that's easy on wheelchairs all the way to the far reaches of the shaft. At the very deepest point, there's about 20 feet with ore car rails embedded into the ground but it poses no real challenge to Tim's chair.

Along the way, we're treated to large holes in the ceiling (called stopes) where miners would follow the gold bearing quartz. There are small holes drilled into the walls where dynamite was packed in to blow the rocks apart.

Letty and I also keep banging our heads on the low roof...hence the reason for the hard hats. Tim's OK down in his chair, though.

Here and there, water seeps through and you can see the beginnings of stalactites forming on the ceiling.

At the end of the shaft, a couple of ore cars sit on the tracks while representation of explosive fuses hang from the walls. An air shaft reaches up 110 feet to allow fresh air in. You can feel the slight breeze.

On the way back, we learn about the wooden bracing to prevent cave ins and closely inspect the white quartz veins, looking for the sparkle of gold.

In the warm Placerville sun outside, we turn in our helmets and head to the gift shop. Two bucks gets us a pan for an hour and we head outside.

Water troughs filled with dirt have been salted with pieces of gemstones that you can mine with your pan until you've had your fill.

After about 15 minutes, we fill a couple of small vials with small pieces of colorful, broken rocks.

It's been a fun and interesting day, and another notch on our list of things we didn't think we'd be able to do with Tim's wheelchair. Now, time to head back down the gold rush highway (highway 49) to home....stopping just to get some delicious barbecue at Poor Reds in El Dorado along the way.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2019 - All Rights Reserved