Between the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento, I-80 passes through an ever more suburbanized corridor of towns like Fairfield (pop. 96,178), home of Travis Air Force Base, the “Jelly Belly” jelly bean factory (800/522-3267), and a large Anheuser-Busch beer refinery (closed Sun. & Mon.); the last two are open for free tours. Running across an unstintingly flat landscape of farmland and “big box” shopping centers, just before Sacramento I-80 races past Davis, a friendly former farming town that’s now home to a University of California campus renowned around the world for its wine-making school.
East of Davis, I-80 is raised on stilts across the Yolo Bypass wetlands, one of the last signs of the natural delta that covered this part of California before the natural water supply was diverted south to Los Angeles.
