From enchanted lunch to bonkers dessert in Placerville
Another slow Sunday. Another crisis of activity. After the successful IKEA trip , I had to think up another location that would engage both parties. Anna had suggested a visit to Placerville, and I jumped at the chance because it promised to be a perfect detour on our way home from Lincoln. But could the charm offensive of this gateway to the Gold Rush live up to a grandma's thirst for window shopping and a child's sense of adventure? What is Placerville? Placerville is a city in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Before the Gold Rush , the area was home to the Miwok and Southern Maidu indigenous peoples. When gold was discovered in the area in the late 1840s, multitudes of people from the eastern U.S. settled there, displacing the indigenous people from the land or decimating them through exposure to pathogens like smallpox . The miners used to carry dry soil to the river to wash out the gold, which gave the city its old name, Dry Diggins. This, along with other mining activities,...