Weird day trips from Sacramento
The strangest Sacramento finds are often a short drive out. These 12 day trips — Preston Castle, Ken Fox's Great Statues of Auburn, Western Railway Museum and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.
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Preston Castle
Built in 1894 to look like a school rather than a prison, this Romanesque pile once held 800 boys at a time a…
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Ken Fox's Great Statues of Auburn
A small-town dentist named Ken Fox (1925–2020) spent nights from the late 1960s on pouring concrete over reba…
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Western Railway Museum
An all-volunteer heritage railway on the edge of the Suisun Marsh preserving the largest surviving fleet of S…
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Loved To Death on Main
The shop that anchored Science Channel's "Oddities: San Francisco" relocated to a historic Main Street storef…
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Knight Foundry
The last water-powered foundry and machine shop left in the United States: an 1873 Gold Rush-era works whose…
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Griffith Quarry Museum
A one-room museum inside the actual 1864 stone office of Welsh immigrant Griffith Griffith's granite works, t…
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National Yo-Yo Museum
Wedged inside a downtown Chico toy shop is a self-declared National Yo-Yo Museum: a free, wall-to-wall spread…
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Hangman's Tree Ice Cream Saloon
In 1849 a vigilante mob hanged accused robbers from an oak tree on this exact spot — the reason Placerville w…
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Keystone Mine
Established in 1853 through the consolidation of several smaller claims, the Keystone Mine became one of the…
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Alabama Mine
Originally worked in the 1850s, the Alabama Mine (also known as the Alabama-California Mine) was a gold and s…
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Garden City Wreckage
Built in 1879, the S.S. Garden City was a 208-foot wooden paddlewheel steamboat that ferried passengers and a…
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Coloma Jail Ruins
Located within Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, these stone ruins are all that remain of El Dorad…