September 13th: Beautiful breakfast and gorgeous gold towns

Tonight we are in Sonora, an old gold-mining town from the 1849 gold rush era. Even better we are staying in the Gunn House Motor Hotel, built in 1850 and a hotel ever since. We started off this morning with a fantastic breakfast at the Wine Way Inn (http://www.winewayinn.com/ ) Our host Nick had prepared home-made granola served with luscious ripe strawberries, apricots and pineapples, then there were home made bakd beans with poached eggs and pork and pineapple sausage and finaly fresh home-made cherry and chocolate chip muffins. Nick is an expatriate Brit and we had a discussion about the peculiarities of the American way of eating breakfast. The tendency, rather than going back several times to at a breakfast like this in courses (granola and fruit, hot dishes, muffins and then maybe some more fruit) , is instead to pile a bit of everything on one plate. Sure enough after this conversation, a lovely American couple came in, went to the buffet and returned with Some granola, fruit, baked beans, eggs and sausage on a plate as well as a muffin. Perhaps my American readers can explain the custom to me?

Anyway breakfast was really special as you can see in the pics above (I'm sorry they're so large, I'm travelling with my son's ee book computer and have no idea how to compress pictures using his software! which also xplains the typos), It certainly set us up for our 3 hour drive across california slowly climbing as we approached the Sierra ranges. We arrived in Sonora, and as promised by myfriend dee, this little town is gorgous, with a main street retaining all it's original buildings, maany now containing antique shops!! We also made an accidntal discovery of the nearby Columbi historical State Prk, which is an original mining town in (mostly ) original state and with its buildings set up as they were originally used. We then drove on to Angel's Camp, yet another beautifully maintained gold rush town, with some 1930s deco buildings which replaced originals which burnt down. A lovely day all round, and now we are sitting on the verandah of the hotel as the sun sets, sipping a corona and contemplating our trip over the Sonora Pass tomorrow to the 'ghost town' of Bodie and hopefully some hot springs.