Allendale, CA

Allendale is a rural community in Solano County, strung along Interstate 505 north of Vacaville and west of Dixon. It covers roughly six square miles of low ground, and the freeway is its one major landmark. The land around it belongs to farms, orchards and acreage homes rather than to any town center, with orchards, pasture and long driveways filling in the rest. Three larger places fill in the picture. Vacaville, founded in 1851, supplies the shopping, the Nut Tree roadside complex and the Premium Outlets. Winters, across the county line in Yolo County, sits on Putah Creek along the same freeway, a small farm town with orchards on its edges. Dixon, to the east, holds the regional fairgrounds and the freeway links to Davis. Between them lies a farm landscape that has built a small visitor scene of its own. The Pleasants Valley Agricultural Association links farms along Pleasants Valley Road, including Joyful Ranch, Soul Food Farm and Morningsun Herb Farm, and an annual Open Farm Day invites visitors to tour them, taste products and buy honey, olive oil, lavender and fruit. Allendale itself is outside that circuit, but the same countryside surrounds it. Homes here are mostly single-family houses on acreage, with a mix of working orchards, horse property and quiet drives. Public schools belong to the Vacaville Unified district. Daily life depends on the interstate. A short drive reaches grocery stores in Vacaville, Winters or Dixon, and none of the three is far enough to be a hardship, though none is a walk either. There is no transit to speak of. Allendale also turns up in literature, since Ray Bradbury borrowed the name for a town in a story about a ruined future. The real community is the opposite, a place that stays out of the way and keeps its acreage open.