Friday Night in Fresno

Friday, 25 Aug 2026, 10pm. Fresno, California.

It's Friday night and we're in Fresno. Yes, that means it's Friday Night Halfway! Because why the hell else would anybody want to leave Silicon Valley to go to Fresno. 🤣

Maybe I shouldn't bust too hard on Fresno. It is the state's fifth most populous city. With a population of 550,000 it's ahead of Sacramento, the state capital; and Oakland. It's behind fourth-place San Francisco. But as basically an overgrown farm town iit is... miles away from San Francisco.

Speaking of miles, the drive this evening was about 168 miles. The map shows a timing estimate of 2:38 at off times. With traffic it took us about 30 minutes longer. Plus another 50-60 minutes for a dinner stop. All in, we were in our hotel by 10pm. Oh, and yeah, technically we're not in Fresno. We're in the adjoining town of Clovis, which I guess could be described as "Just as dismal as Fresno, but with even less to do."

Our plan for Saturday is to head east, up into the Sierra Nevada mountains. We've picked out a pair of waterfall trails to hike. With this head start from Friday Night Halfway we should have time to hike both of them!

Update: Keep reading in:

• Five Things en route to Fresno
• After Friday Night Halfway it's... Saturday the Rest of the Way!

Travelog: Friday Night to Fresno

I wrote in my previous blog about driving to Fresno on Friday night. It was more, though, than just "Leave home, drive 168 miles, 'You Have Arrived at Destination.'" The drive involves a number of legs of travel and points of interest that are so usual to me nowadays I often pass by them without even thinking. But what are they? Here are Five Things:

1. Gilroy
As we leave from Silicon Valley headed south on US 101 we traverse scattered ranchlands then pass through a few small cities at the south end of Santa Clara County. Gilroy, 40 miles from home, is the largest of these, with a population around 60,000. Billing itself "The Garlic Capital of the World" for the many garlic farms nearby and the garlic processing plant at the edge of town, it definitely smells of garlic. It's pungent enough with garlic aroma to make one's eyes water.

Friday night we intended to stop for dinner in Gilroy. In fact we actually did stop, but at the smell of not just pungent garlic but pungent cow manure (seriously, it smelled like roasted garlic plus an overfull port-a-potty on a hot day) we jumped back in the car and fled.

2. Casa de Fruta
We head east from Gilroy on state route 152, which crosses the rugged and surprisingly remote Diablo range mountains. At the foot of these mountains on the west side is a memorable oasis called Casa de Fruta. Taking its name from the style of the many fruit stands along route 152, where local farmers sell fresh produce cheap, Casa de Fruta is like a whole village dedicated to the idea. It's like the area's version of South of the Border or Wall Drug.

3. San Luis Reservoir
On the other side of the Diablo range, coming down from the Pachecho Pass, route 152 wraps around the shores of the San Luis Reservoir. It's a man-made lake, and it is huge. Or at least it seems huge, nestled in against the eastern flank of the mountains on one side and overlooking California's massive Central Valley on the other. One curiousity about San Luis Reservoir is that it does not catch runoff from the mountains. It actually stores water that is pumped uphill from canals in the Central Valley and redistributes back down to smooth out seasonal flows.

4. Los Banos and the rest of Route 152
A few miles after route 152 leaves San Luis Reservoir it crosses Interstate 5, then a few miles further east it passes through the town of Los Banos. Los Banos, "A Good Place to Take a Leak" (no, that's not really their town slogan). We're 90 miles from home when we stop in Los Banos, The Bathrooms in modern Spanish idiom, for dinner. This time we tried a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant. Despite truly looking every inch a hole in the wall the food was surprisingly good.

Route 152 continues another 36 miles east of Los Banos to its junction with California route 99. This stretch of road is easily the most boring of the entire trip. It's just a dual ribbon of concrete cutting through farmland in the Central Valley.

5. Fly FAT?
There are a lot of things I could say about Fresno, many of them not flattering (like those I wrote in my previous blog. 😅 But what about fattering? Or fattening? This trip we drove around to the east side of Fresno where the airport is. The airport code is FAT. Its full official name is Fresno Yosemite International Airport. At less than 100 miles driving distance to Yosemite Valley it is the closest airport to the park.... But I've never seen anybody say that they're flying to FAT to visit Yosemite.