We went to the State Fair last week, and it was excellent. Just about everything a State Fair should be. There were cows, goats, horses, and pigs. There were colorful stalls for each of California’s fifty-eight counties. (Yolo county won best stall — w00t.) There was deep fried everything. (We tried variously the fried chicken, zucchini, fries, and oreos. Deep fried oreos taste like chocolate cake.) There were award-winning chickens with poofy heads, baby quails and bats, Chinese acrobats, a hypnotist, rickety roller coasters, ferris wheels, and copious water-misting fans. Sadly there were no award-winning baked goods, preserves or produce, but this can be forgiven. Perhaps that’s more of a county fair thing. In any case, we had a great time.

Today we went on our first out-of-town bike ride, to the historic Tremont Church.

Tremont was a township in Solano county, designated as such in 1855, but apparently it never caught on much as a town. Besides scattered farm houses, the only thing left of Tremont is the church and cemetery.

The church is covered in spider webs, but is purportedly still in use, and the cemetery is definitely still active. It also contains the graves of many of the early settlers of Tremont, Davis and Dixon. An excellent writeup of Tremont can be found here.

And besides being a neat historical artifact, Tremont makes an excellent 11-mile bike ride from our house.

The route goes over the South Fork of Putah Creek, which is looking like a cool natural spot to explore later on.

All in all, we highly recommend a trip to Tremont, and also moving to Davis. Davis is great, Davis people is great, and we’re looking forward to getting into this school thing. Delicious research library.

And to close, a token portrait of our cat, who is greatly enjoying his new lair.

More to come!