There are plenty of activities just for adults in Gold Country. Hurst Ranch offers a unique wine tasting experience in the railroad station featured in the film Unforgiven. You can stop and take a drink at The Iron Door Saloon, California’s oldest continuously operating saloon. If you want to mix your alcohol with nature, visit Indigeny Reserve and taste local cider and spirits at its 160-acre nature retreat with hiking trails, picnic areas and park-like settings.

More than 80 palate-tempting restaurants are there for the tasting in downtown Napa. Ranging from quick casual snacks to Michelin-starred dining, exceptional options include L’assiette-rated restaurants Angèle, Ca' Momi Osteria, Charlie Palmer Steak Napa, Compline, Miminashi and Zuzu — to Bib Gourmand-rated restaurants Grace’s Table, Oenotri and Gran Eléctrica — or one-star-rated La Toque. Plan your trip around the bimonthly DoNapa Culinary Crawl to enjoy specially prepared bites at three locations, along with exciting raffles and prizes. 

According to a statement provided by the Skid Row Housing Trust, the new space will serve an additional 1,200 patients within the first year and is projected to serve up to 7,000 annually. The clinic will include 18 medical exam rooms, six consultation rooms, eight dental chairs, nine mental health rooms, and 13 social work and care coordination offices. There will also be a large multi-purpose room for fitness classes and health education as well as a meditation room and a chaplain’s office.

Although the federal government is the supreme authority on broad matters like immigration, in some cases, states have sovereignty over more precise issues like health and public safety. That’s what Becerra asserted at a press conference on Tuesday where he expressed that, through the Tenth Amendment, California has the right to handle public safety in the ways it sees fit. Calmly poised, Becerra assured Californians that the claims made in the lawsuit demonstrated “there’s nothing really new there that we weren’t already familiar with.”

Impelled by severe drought conditions, residents have been seriously saving water in the last few months of summer. Californians cut water use by 27 percent in August, according to the Associated Press. That’s compared to August 2013, state regulators announced on Thursday, Oct. 1. The reduction was slightly less than the 31 percent decline in July, but stable with the 27 percent conservation effort made in June.

California led the nationwide charge in implementing the Affordable Care Act, including a provision in it that has helped a little more than 2 million more people sign up for the state’s low-income health insurance program known as Medi-Cal.But in spring, the Brown administration turned down a $6 million grant from the California Endowment (TCE) to keep those previously enrolled, as well as those newly enrolled poor people, on the insurance program. 

Californians rank the drought as their number-one environmental concern, according to a new statewide survey. The poll by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found three out of four residents favor mandatory curbs on water use. “They want the local district to do something -- mandatory reductions -- and they want the state government to do something,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO. “They recognize that it is a problem and the most important issue.”

 

The study found that the drought — the third most severe on record — is responsible for the greatest water loss ever seen in California agriculture, with river water for Central Valley farms reduced by roughly one-third. Groundwater pumping is expected to replace most river water losses, with some areas more than doubling their pumping rate over the previous year, the study said. More than 80 percent of this replacement pumping occurs in the San Joaquin Valley and Tulare Basin.

According to a new study by the real estate website, Trulia, San Francisco ranks second in the nation among cities with the highest income gap. And, my hometown also tops the list of cities with the most expensive price for homes per square feet. Business Insider reports that a million dollars will buy about a 1,500-sq-foot home in San Francisco. That amount in Boston, which ranked second, would fetch a 2,092-sq-foot home. 

This sprawling city east of San Francisco is home to Chevron’s oil refinery, which has made it a battleground between the company’s business interests and environmental activists who are calling for checks on air quality and safety. Now, as part of the company’s latest effort to rehabilitate its image in the city, Chevron is launching its own community news site. Chevron spokesperson Melissa Ritchie said that Chevron wanted to start the site because, “We want to make sure there’s a way to have a conversation with Richmond.”