Hello All,

With all the rain we've been having here, I haven't been walking on my lunch as much as I would have liked. I substituted with Core Rythms exercise a few days. Today, since I'm off and it's pretty blue sky day, I went to the park and walked the entire trail that winds around it. I've never actually walked the entire thing before so I'm pretty proud of myself for that. It's great exercise of course, since it's hilly and all kinds of muscles get worked. It was a good day for it and I'm glad I went.

So, because I took my walk in the park today I have now reached (and actually surpassed) my Vacaville, California destination.

What's so great about Vacaville? Well, not much that I could find! LOL I had to dig around a bit to find out anything of much interest about this stop, but I did find a few nifty things.

Here goes ...

- The city of Vacaville was founded in 1852.

- Like Martinez, one of my former stops, Vacaville was a Pony Express stop.

- Vacaville was home to the Nut Tree. Those of us familiar to the area know the Nut Tree as a roadside stop between the Bay Area and Sacramento. It's a place families would stop to eat, shop, or have the kids play. The place was closed for many years and reopened 2006. There was a children's amusement park and a bocce ball venue. Sadly, the new Nut Tree closed again in January 2009.

- Dwarf Calicoflower grows in Vacaville vernal pools. This flower grows in only two known places in the world - Chile and California! This member of the bellflower family grows in wet places such as ditches and vernal pools. What the heck is a "vernal pool" you ask? Well, they are temporary pools of water. Being temporary, these pools have no fish and allow the safe proliferation of tadpoles and insects. Okay, that's kinda icky, but another wonderful thing about vernal pools is that they are home to lots of flowers, many of them rare flowers. The pools are dry through most of summer and fall and fill up when the rains come. In the spring, as the waters evaporate from the edges of a pool, rings of flowers bloom around it. As the season wears on and the waters continue to recede, new flowers grow, older flowers change colors and green grass encompasses entire collection. Flowers such as the above mentioned Calicoflower, Colusa Grass, and my favorite name - Tricolor Monkeyflower. It must look like a sort of kaleidoscope-scape. One of the things that struck me about these flowers is that, being California native plants, they've adapted over the many, many years to living on minimal amounts of water. A California-grown creature myself, this made me chuckle since water conservation is something that I've heard about for as long as I can remember. I pictured the flowers' mommies reminding them to conserve! He he. But hardy though they may be, these particular flowers are endangered right along with the pools. Only a small percentage of California's original vernal pools continue to exist. Environmental reasons such as drought and pollution are a factor, but development is a major issue for their dwindling numbers. In the dry season they don't look like much so developers and farmers see them as open land. Luckily places like the California Native Plant Society and others are working to help preserve these pools and the plants they support. Their website, www.cnps.org has some beautiful pictures of not only vernal pool plants, but many native Californian plants.

Well, thanks for joining me on this stop. I'm already a couple of miles in on my journey to my next dot on the map, Dixon. I hope you all enjoyed my Vacaville research as much as enjoyed researching it. Thanks again for those of you who have been openly supportive. It has helped to keep me pushing on!

Lookout Dixon, I'm on my way!

Monica