Stop the car, there's a Historical Landmark!

Sign on Highway 20 in Penn Valley.

On our first road trip together, we had the “Scones Incident.”

“Could you get me a tall coffee?” my husband asked that morning outside a Starbucks in Barstow, Calif. 

But when I came back to the car, I was holding only my coffee.

“Where’s mine?” he said.

“Oh.” I held up the bag in my other hand. “I got distracted by the pastry case. There were scones!”

He shook his head and laughed.

 

That was cool.

 

Because two decades and countless miles later, I’m still getting distracted by scones, only now they are Historical Landmark signs.

“Wait, ‘World’s First Long-Distance Telephone Line?! Can we check it out, please?!” I cried while we were heading down Highway 20 near Grass Valley earlier this year. I had no idea there was such a thing in Northern California, and now I had to see it.

A bit miraculously, my husband agreed to head up Pleasant Valley Road to French Corral, the tiny town where the telephone line had been strung. But although there’s really nothing else in French Corral except a few houses and a cool, barn-like Wells Fargo building, we could not find that telephone line marker, despite driving by it twice that first day.

I figured I’d never get to see that telephone line, but on our way home from Grass Valley the next day, we passed the sign again and my husband sighed. “Do you want to try again?”

I sure did! And this time we crawled down that road once we reached French Corral, our eyes peeled, and finally I spotted the marker, barely bigger than a mailbox with no sign next to it.

But it is right next to someone's driveway, which is probably why it’s so hard to find. Maybe there used to be a sign, but whoever lives there took it down, sick of people like me looking for that “dang marker,” pictured at right.

Finding that historical landmark took two days and 40 extra miles on narrow, winding mountain roads, but I was so happy to see it, and even happier that my husband had offered to drive me there.

Because years earlier he threw a fit when I wanted to make another side trip. We had stopped at a park to pee the dog on the last leg of another road trip when I saw a short trail of Donner Party historical sites, but my husband did not want to wait for me to hike it. Granted, he had just spent the last two weeks driving us to Yellowstone National Park and back through snow and the dog’s explosive diarrhea, and he just wanted to get home. But the trail would just take another 15 minutes. And when would I be back there again?

I did walk that trail, but my husband wasn’t happy about it.

 

So it was that much cooler when he offered, twice, to try and find another historical site. I guess he finally has completely given into “Scones.”