Shenandoah Valley and Fiddletown: Vineyards and graveyards.

After breakfast today (about noon!) we decided to take a drive up Amador County’s Shenandoah Valley, wine country. Wow! There are miles and miles of vines covering the valley and hillsides. I think we must have passed 35 to 40 different little wineries. We stopped at one on the way out to get a drink and snack and Beth headed off into the vines to take a look and a few pictures. Inside they were selling cases of wine for around $100 to $250 and more. To a guy who balks at $5.99 for a 12 pack of Diet Coke I felt a little out of my league.

This is gold rush country and we passed through a couple of gold rush towns. We stopped to look around a little in one called Fiddletown. It is pretty small and not developed much but the kind of place explorers love. This is one of the old buildings on the main street.

Beth loves old school houses so we hunted this one down up the hill a little. Across the road was the graveyard and we wandered a little there also.

The town dates back to 1850 and many of the graves go back to soon after that, the 1860’s and 70’s. One of the things a visit like this reminds you is that life was hard back then. A lot of the people died young. Many died in infancy and many women died in child bearing years. One plot held 3 wives of the same man. One died in November of 1871 at the age of 38 and the next died in February of 1873 at 25! Luckily the third lived to be 77. Another held a husband and wife. The husband died at the age of 49 and the wife died about a month later at 42. It’s hard to imagine what life would have been like back then.

There was a little museum in a building built by a Chinese doctor and here is the sign they had in the door. Wise people the Chinese.