Quick Tour of Penn Valley, CA
Tour taken Sunday, February 26, 2012,  Posted March 7, 2012

Sunday drives are becoming a larger part of our octogenarian lives. On this day we finally decided to drive off into the roads of Penn Valley, our nominal home town. Lake Wildwood is part of the Penn Valley region but we have become separated because LWW is a gated community.  The northern edge of Penn Valley township is about two miles south on Pleasant Valley road from our main gate.

The more densely populated part of Penn Valley is in a triangle formed by Penn Valley Drive on the north , Indian Springs Road on the west, and Spenceville Road on the east, as seen in the map below.  Pleasant Valley Road to Lake Wildwood and points north intersects Hwy 20 and Penn Valley Drive near the upper left corner of the triangle. It has no label because I cut off the map tight to the triangle.

We've lived in LWW for 18 years, yet never drove into the interior of the Penn Valley triangle. Today we did, on Easy Street then Hilltop Road and the Siesta Drive loop, and then Norton Street to its southern end and back out and around Lasso Loop, and finally up and back Broken Oak Court to see this new community (about 10 years old).
Penn Valley Township Triangle
 
We toured a bit outside the triangle but mostly spent the rest of our Sunday drive heading south into horse and livestock country.  The map below extends south from the southern tip of the triangle in the map above.  We drove down Spenceville Road past the Pilot Peak Vineyard and Winery and on to the intersection with Oak Meadow Road, where there is a fairly big sign that lists residents to be found out this road and its offshoots.  We drove quite a way down Bald Mountain Road and then returned to continue on Oak Meadow Road.  We drove a good way along this road, too, and were rewarded by well-kept ranches and rolling oak-tree-dotted hills.  It was a pleasant, heart warming drive.

The roads were smoothly paved (with speed bumps here and there) but winding with blind spots and just wide enough for two-way traffic, so there weren't many places to stop and take pictures.  Now that I know there is very little traffic on these roads I think I'll return and pull over to the side as much as I can to let any cars go by.  As we returned back along our outgoing tracks on Oak Meadow Road I did find a spot wide enough to park for pictures, but not of the more interesting scenes we saw.

Beginning of horse-and-livestock-country roads south of Penn Valley Township

These pictures show mainly the wide open spaces between ranches, dotted with oaks.

This picture and the next were taken by simply turning 90 degrees to the right
and using fences to convey the ranch feeling of the entire area.

As above, but lined up with the fence on the right.

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