California Trivia & Tidbits - Page 5

Looking for California trivia? Try our list California little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

—It’s not unusual for residents of Cameron Park (pop. 14,549) to commute to work by airplane. The “airpark” community features an airstrip surrounded by homes with extra-wide streets that double as taxiways, signs that are shorter than usual so that wings don’t clip them as aircraft go by, and even “garages” that store planes instead of cars.

first appeared: 1/28/2007

A sign depicting two cartoon chefs, named Hap-Pea and Pea-Wee, welcomes visitors to Pea Soup Andersen’s restaurant in Buellton (pop. 3,828). Founded in 1924 as Andersen’s Electric Café—to honor Anton and Juliette Andersen’s new electric stove—the eatery became known as the home of split pea soup after Juliette’s recipe for the hearty concoction, brought from her home country of France, gained fame.

first appeared: 1/28/2007

The Golden State is home to three of the eight mothers featured on the Travel Channel’s Moms on the Road: Africa show, which follows the women as they travel across four countries in southern Africa by overland truck and stay in everything from luxury hotels to township hostels. Making the televised journey are Pat Gay of Los Angeles, Mary Beth Leland of Richmond and Jackie Nova of Tarzana.

first appeared: 1/14/2007

—It was a day for true hot-dogging at Imperial Beach (pop. 26,992) in August, when more than 30 dogs climbed onto surfboards for the first annual Surf Dog Small Wave Competition. The dogs were judged on style, poise and the length of their surfboard rides through the waves. At the close of competition, judges declared Zoey, a Jack Russell terrier, top surf dog. The event was a fund-raiser for the Pacific Animal Welfare Society.

first appeared: 12/17/2006

The new home of the American Institute of Mathematics in Morgan Hill (pop. 33,556) will be a castle-like building of more than 165,000 square feet modeled after the Alhambra Palace in Spain. Featuring Moorish architecture, including arches and a fountain that will indicate the hour of the day using water that flows from the mouths of 12 stone lions, the institute’s headquarters is expected to open in 2009. The reported $50 million cost of the project will be funded largely by John Fry, co-founder of Fry’s Electronics, based in San Jose.

first appeared: 12/17/2006

—The Internet search engine company Google has blanketed its hometown of Mountain View with a free wireless network, providing Internet access to anyone with a wireless-equipped computer. The network cost about $1 million to develop and is supported by 380 radio antennas strategically placed on light poles around the 12-square-mile community.

first appeared: 12/3/2006

—Built primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, 46 historic beach cottages—including one that appeared in the 1988 movie Beaches starring Bette Midler—sit on the coastline between Laguna Beach (pop. 23,727) and Corona del Mar. Many of the Crystal Cove Beach Cottages have been restored to their vintage 1935-1955 condition, with 13 recently made available for vacation rental by the California state parks system.

first appeared: 11/19/2006

—Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey have mapped some of the world’s largest underwater sand dunes, located west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Up to 700 feet long and 30 feet high, the “sand waves” cover 2 square miles and are created by tidal currents that move some 500 billion gallons of water through the mile-wide opening to San Francisco Bay every six hours.

first appeared: 11/5/2006

An upward-sweeping, wing-like roofline marks the Tramway Gas Station along Highway 111, welcoming travelers into Palm Springs (pop. 42,807). Constructed in 1965, the building was designed by Albert Frey, a Swiss-born architect who specialized in a style known as desert modernism. Once threatened with demolition, the structure now serves as a visitor’s center for the local tourism bureau.

first appeared: 11/5/2006

—For between $200 and $500, sponsors can “adopt” an endangered brown pelican being cared for at the International Bird Rescue Research Center’s two locations in California. Facilities in San Pedro and Fairfield, which are part of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, help rescue birds and other animals affected by oil spills. They also rehabilitate sick or injured animals.

first appeared: 10/22/2006

The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, near Palm Springs (pop. 42,807), made history in 2000 with a renovation that included new 80-passenger, Swiss-manufactured cabins that were the largest of their kind and the first in North America to rotate 360 degrees during their ascent. The Tramway has carried more than 12 million people through Chino Canyon since it opened in 1963.

first appeared: 10/22/2006

—Some of the best whitewater rafting in the Sierras can be found near Groveland (pop. 3,388) on an 18-mile stretch of the Tuolumne River between Meral’s Pool and Ward’s Ferry. Rapids such as Rock Garden, Sunderland’s Chute and Ram’s Head give rafters plenty of challenges on the river, which officially was designated a National Wild and Scenic River in 1984. Visitors to Moaning Cavern, near Vallecito (pop. 427), can walk or even rappel into the cave where explorers discovered a human skull reported to be up to 13,000 years old. Cave tours are run by Sierra Nevada Recreation Corp., which operates three other caving adventures and an underground mine tour in the state.

first appeared: 10/8/2006

On its 28-mile, round-trip journey between Woodland (pop. 49,151) and West Sacramento (pop. 31,615), the Sacramento RiverTrain crosses an 8,000-foot trestle—one of the longest in the western United States. The excursion train, which offers special events such as murder mysteries, runs along the Sacramento River in Yolo County on a rail line that the Woodland and Sacramento Railroad first built in 1911-1912.

first appeared: 9/24/2006

David Phillips earned more than 1.2 million frequent flyer miles in 1999 by buying about $3,100 in Healthy Choice soups and puddings. The civil engineer from Davis (pop. 60,308) collected the universal price codes from the products-including 12,150 pudding containers-and submitted them to a promotion that awarded 1,000 miles for every 10 price codes sent in by May of that year.

first appeared: 9/10/2006

The X-38, a prototype "lifeboat" for the crew of the International Space Station that descends under a parafoil, or steerable parachute, made several successful test landings, beginning in the late 1990s, on Rogers Dry Lakebed near NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base (pop. 5,909).

first appeared: 9/8/2006

Both placer mining and river dredging were used to recover gold near the community of Jenny Lind, established in the mid-1800s on the Calaveras River in Calaveras County (pop. 40,554). The town reportedly was named for "Swedish nightingale" singer Jenny Lind, who toured the United States—although not California's gold country—between 1850 and 1852.

first appeared: 8/27/2006

Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey created a building out of bottles in the mid-1950s at her Simi Valley home to house her collection of 4,000 pencils. Subsequent years saw her adding shrines, wishing wells, walkways and other structures made from "found" objects, including more bottles, to her "Bottle Village." Prisbrey died in 1988, but her folk art site lives on, thanks to money donated for its upkeep.

first appeared: 8/27/2006

Reaching speeds of 62 mph on a track 170 feet high and 3,602 feet long, "Tatsu" opened in May as one of the world's fastest, tallest, and longest roller coasters. The new ride celebrates 45 years of thrills at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, northwest of San Fernando (pop. 23,564). With a name that means "flying beast" in Japanese, Tatsu includes inline roll, zero-G roll and pretzel-loop track features.

first appeared: 8/13/2006

When a worker discovered huge footprints on a construction site in Humboldt County in 1958, a newspaper in nearby Eureka (pop. 26,128) picked up the story of "Bigfoot"—and the construction company's owner, Ray Wallace, became a source of tales about the creature. Although Wallace's family reported after his death in 2002 that the tracks were faked, some people still believe otherwise.

first appeared: 7/30/2006

In the 1850s, herbal doctor Yee Fung Cheung founded a shop in Fiddletown in Amador County (pop. 35,100) to serve Chinese immigrants who were seeking gold in the area. Known as the "Chew Kee" store after a subsequent owner, the building today houses a museum that contains herbs and other artifacts.

first appeared: 7/16/2006

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