Express Yourselves

A stroll around California's state capital today revealed some oddness, some ugliness and the odd little gem.

The town seems strangely quiet. There are people of course, but they don't seem to quite fill out the size of the city. There's an 'Old Town' by the river that's nice, but a little too theme park for my liking - and also seems much quieter than it should be. A giant indoor/outdoor shopping mall slap bang in the centre of downtown also seems to have left little need for the shops and businesses that usually help give a town centre its character. There may little pockets of goodness elsewhere in the city that lay undiscovered by me - and for the sake of the locals sanity I hope there are.

Speaking of sanity, a couple of people felt the need to bark questions at me in the street with not an intro or 'excuse me' in sight.
'Where's thirteenth street' shouted one, which turned out unlucky for him as I genuinely tried to help but later realised I'd sent him in the exact opposite direction.
'What street is this?' boomed another into my face, who seemed mightily perplexed at my answer 'not a clue mate'.
The pièce de résistance however was a squeeky-voiced lady who enquired, 'do you know where the place is where people meet and have food?'
This question was made all the more surreal by a man on a passing bicycle screaming 'cross the road, cross the road' at us. I swear I'm not making this up, and this kind of madness/talking shite to strangers/random bouts of vocality seem to be a normal part of life in The States.

As well as a decent helping of mentalists, Sacramento is also steeped in it's fair share of history. The statue above commorates the Pony Express, a mail service that was spurred on by the threat of the Civil War and the need for faster communication with the West. It consisted of relays of men riding horses carrying saddlebags of mail across a two thousand mile trail. The service opened officially on April 3rd 1860, and the first westbound trip was made in ten days, the eastbound journey taking eleven and a half. The riders covered an impressive 250 miles in a 24-hour day.

As time progressed the Pony Express grew to more than one hundred stations, eighty riders, and between four and five hundred horses. Its route was extremely hazardous, but amazingly only one sack of mail was ever lost. The service only lasted a year and a half however, closing on October 24th, 1861, when the completion of the Pacific Telegraph line ended the need for its existence.
ADespite the fact that California relied almost completely upon news from the Pony Express during the early days of the Civil War, the horse line was never a financial success and led its founders to bankruptcy. The romantic drama surrounding the epic journeys of the Express however, cemented its place within the legends of America's Old West.