July 2011/Edition2 – Cruising for Bargains on Dollar Tuesdays. Location – Downtown around K and R Streets. Short on cash but want to get out? No need to sell your plasma at a blood center or unload your music collection at The Beat. If you can hang on ‘til Tuesday, there are some tasty bargains out there from downtown establishments willing to lure you in their door by staying out of your wallet. Pedal down to 7th and K and try a Vive taco for a buck – inside where it’s cool or outside on the patio. This part of K Street has been recently cleaned up by the city and it’s looking better than it has in years.   If you’d rather eat asian, give Wayside Noodles a try on 9th and J. Happy ho

July 2011/Edition1 – Three Japanese places barely on your radar. Location – Downtown 10th, 11th &12th Streets, between Broadway & R.   Summer is here. It’s hot. Tomato plants are hitting their stride – if you listen hard enough you can practically hear them growing inches by the hour. But it’s still early for the Early Girls, and it’s too hot to cook. So, time to take the cruiser for a spin and see what we can find. R Street has new restaurants and is usually hopping. The city is repaving this neglected corridor and restoring the historic rail. (If only they would put a trolley on it.) What's this? The new Shoki Ramen House! Their first location off 2nd Ave near Crepeville always has

Early Saturday morning saw a break in the weather, so I headed for the swollen rivers with my 14-foot sit-in polyethylene kayak. Embarking at Sutter's Landing, I headed downstream to see what all the rain and water releases from the Folsom dam had done to the lower American and Sacramento rivers. The float took only ninety minutes with no hard paddling -- the current is strong and the waters turbid and brown. It was a solitary journey shared with only a few scattered fowl and plenty of flotsam washed loose from upstream shores. For those heartier souls it is a  worthy adventure.Wool socks recommended.

We have alot of history here in Sacramento -- so much that it might seem daunting to narrow it to a manageble list. Here is an attempt to do just that: seven "must see" places you can pedal to in about the time it takes to sit and watch a movie.  1. The State Capitol Following less-than-satisfactory assemblies of the state Legislature in San Jose, Vallejo and Benicia, Sacramentans successfully bid to make their city the permanent site for such high-level meetings. Ground was broken in 1860 and the neo-classical dome of the California Capitol was completed in 1874. The lower level is made of granite quarried in Folsom; the upper levels are made of brick plastered and painted to look like

 If you took a trip to, say, Phnom Penh, you would expect to be able to take a pedicab from your hotel to a restaurant and then afterwards around the city for a tour. The same would be true for most cities in Southeast Asia. But these days you might be surprised to do the same in Frankfurt or Delft … or even more recently in Boston or Sacramento. Pedicabs are being introduced in cities across Europe and America. The reasons are varied. Certainly they are a green alternative to cars or other forms of internal-combustion transport. There have been some technical innovations such as the electric assist that have made them more user-friendly. I like to think of their emergence in modern indus