Calaveras County Spring

About this time last year I took a short road trip with a friend to Murphys in Calaveras County where early spring is a beautiful time for a visit, California's golden poppies providing splashes of color along the sides of Highway 4. The quaint little Gold Rush town is quiet, its sidewalks almost empty. Only locals seem to be around, going about their daily errands.

Murphys Hotel

I've always loved Murphys, which is one of California's best-preserved 19th century towns. The streets are lined with towering oaks and cedars. Handsome buildings from the late 1800s have been restored, but not to the point that they are unrecognizable from their Gold Rush days. The Murphys of today is a tourism destination, there's no doubt about that. It is full of wine tasting rooms, shops and boutiques. But they are tasteful and the town is not overrun with kitsch.

Several historic buildings have been turned into good restaurants, including Firewood, which has wonderful wood-fired pizza and Mexican food.

California's golden poppies

The saloon at the funky old Murphys Hotel is always fun, its creaky wooden floors where Mark Twain once walked are steeped in history, and no doubt more than one spilled beer over the decades.

For a little bit of Europe, there's Milfiori, an inn just outside of Murphys in the old mining hamlet of Douglas Flat. The atmosphere is more like Provence or Tuscany than hardscrabble mining town. There are lush, wide lawns and comfortable chaise lounges, hanging wisteria and pots of lavender.

Owner Willi Krauss, a Silicon Valley refugee, has created a haven in the restored 1860s farmhouse with three bedrooms and a wide front porch made for idling away a sleepy afternoon. A cozy little cottage rests near the barn in the back. Next door is the historic Pioneer Schoolhouse that dates from the early 1850s.

Milfiori Inn

The Italian Store

A couple of times a year, Willi unshutters the rustic stone building at the front of the property, the "Italian Store." Built in 1861 to sell goods to the legions of Italian and Welsh miners that flooded the area in search for gold, today it's a storehouse for antiques and collectibles.

This spring, the store's old iron doors will be opened April 28 and 20 for the twice-annual sale -- and chance to peak inside one of Calaveras County's many historic treasures.

Pioneer Schoolhouse, early 1850s

News from Three Northern California Getaways

Every year, new attractions and places to explore seem to open up in northern California, and this year is no different. I met with a few destination marketers this week at a California tourism promotion event in San Francisco and picked up some newsy tidbits for northern California weekend getaways.

***In Calaveras County, two new tour companies are taking visitors into the area's many vineyards in different ways: by bike and horseback. A company called Horse and Barrel saddles up in the cute-as-a-button Gold Country town of Murphys -- home of 16 tasting rooms on Main Street -- and leads riders through local vineyards. Wine tasting comes after the horses are back in the barn. A similar concept is behind Get On Your Mark, a Calaveras County outfit founded by a USA certified cycling coach. These "wine" bike adventures feature bike rides through the rural Calaveras countryside and vineyards, lunch and, after the ride, wine tasting to cap it off.

***Up in El Dorado County, home of Coloma, the gold discovery site, tourism promoters are cheering the recent acquisition by the American River Conservancy of the 272-acre Gold Hill Ranch. This is a little-known historic site, just a mile south of Coloma and the Marshall Gold State Historic Park (about 40 miles north of Sacramento).

The ranch was first settled by Japanese from Aizu Wakamatsu, a region of Japan, in 1869. It is the birthplace of the first naturalized Japanese-American and the only community established by samurai outside of Japan. The Japanese who lived here started silk worm farming and cultivated tea, rice, citrus, peaches and other stone fruit. The National Park Service recently placed the site -- called Wakamatsu Colony -- on the National Register of Historic Places at a level of "national significance." Plans are in the works to open 19th century farmhouses and acres of beautiful hilly and oak-dotted land to the public.

***In Santa Cruz, two landmarks are celebrating milestones in 2011. The Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse opened 25 years ago to commemorate a young surfer who lost his life to the sport. The small red-brick building, perched on the cliffs overlooking the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean, is home to the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum. Several of the original long-board surfboards (some made from redwood planks) from the early days of surfing hang from the walls. Other exhibits include surfing industry legend and pioneer Jack O'Neill's prototype wetsuits.

A few minutes' walk away at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, the beautiful old carousel turns 100 this year.  One of the few remaining carousels in the U.S. with an actual brass ring, riders of one of 72 hand-carved horses and colorful chariots can try to reach it as they pass. The other boardwalk historic landmark -- the thundering Giant Dipper wooden roller coaster -- has a few years to go before its centennial. It opened in 1924.