Rio Vista

Understand

Rio Vista sits on the northwest bank of the Sacramento River. It's a quiet town which is beginning to suffer from overdevelopment of tract houses built to house the overflowing populations of Sacramento and the Bay Area. Ships headed from the ocean to Sacramento routinely pass by the waterfront.

Rio Vista briefly made international headlines during the 1980s when a wayward Humpback Whale took it upon itself to swim upstream before becoming a spectacle. The Whale spent about a week near Rio Vista before being led back to the ocean 100 miles away.

The area around Rio Vista in the Sacramento Delta has often been used in films as a stand-in for the Mississippi delta when it's too expensive for a Hollywood production to film in Louisiana.

Get in

By car

Rio Vista is in the heart of the California Delta, and accordingly is skirted by levee roads on most sides. Highway 160 is a wonderful drive if you can handle its narrow lanes, and offers a scenic view of many delta waterways as it follows their winding paths all the way from Sacramento in the north to Antioch in the south. Turning from Highway 160 onto Highway 12 West, drivers will pass over the Rio Vista Bridge, an iconic draw bridge admired by Rio Vistans as one of their most renowned monuments. Entering from Highway 12 East coming from Fairfield, one must drive very carefully, as this is one of the deadliest roads in all of California.

By plane

Rio Vista Municipal Airport

Get around

Although the Rio Vista City Council has brought great improvements to the bus lines running through Rio Vista, it is much easier to walk. The entirety of the downtown area can be ambled through in just about 15 minutes, that is, if you can resist the tug of such bucolic boutiques as The Social Butterfly Consignment Store and the many eateries which line Main Street. The parts of the riverfront that are pedestrian accessible are also easy to walk to.