11 Best Sights in The Central Valley, California

You can stroll among dozens of restored military aircraft at this outdoor facility. The vintage war birds include the B-25 Mitchell medium-range bomber—best known for the Jimmy Doolittle raid on Tokyo after the attack on Pearl Harbor—and the speedy SR-71 Blackbird, used for reconnaissance over Vietnam and Libya. A recently arrived star is an aircraft that from 1974 to 2006 was known as Air Force One whenever it transported the U.S president.

This 16-acre site is one of the Central Valley's top museum complexes. The indoor-outdoor Kern County Museum is an open-air, walk-through historic village with more than 55 restored or re-created buildings dating from the 1860s to the 1940s. "Black Gold: The Oil Experience," a permanent exhibit, shows how oil is created, discovered, extracted, and transformed for various uses. The Lori Brock Children's Discovery Center, for ages eight and younger, has hands-on displays and an indoor playground.

A cadre of sweet, well-informed volunteers runs this jam-packed throwback of a museum that's bigger than it looks from the outside. With exhibits about Lake Isabella, minerals and gems, old tools and farming implements, pioneer and native life, and Hollywood Westerns shot in the area, you’ll likely find something to intrigue you.

In pretty Victory Park, the Haggin has one of the Central Valley's finest art collections. Highlights include landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, a still life by Paul Gauguin, a Native American gallery, and an Egyptian mummy.

Fashions, furnishings, toys, and military artifacts at this living-history museum tell the region's story. The facility is inside the former Carnegie Library, a Romanesque-style building dating from 1905.

The drive along palm-lined Kearney Boulevard is one of the best reasons to visit the museum, which stands in shaded 225-acre Kearney Park. The century-old home of M. Theo Kearney, Fresno's onetime "raisin king," is accessible only on guided 45-minute tours.

The best exhibits at this repository of early Modesto and Stanislaus County memorabilia include the re-creations of an old-time dentist's office, a blacksmith's shop, and a schoolroom. Also worth a peek are the extensive doll collection and a general store stocked with period goods such as hair crimpers and corsets.

Along the Blossom Trail, roughly halfway between Fresno and Visalia, the colorful handiwork of local quilters is on display at the Mennonite Quilt Center. Try to visit on Monday (except holidays) between 8 and noon, when two dozen quilters stitch, patch, and chat over coffee. Prime viewing time—with the largest number of quilts—is in February and March, before the center's early-April auction. Ask a docent to take you to the locked upstairs room, where most of the quilts hang; you'll learn about the fine points of patterns such as the Log Cabin Romance, the Dahlia, and the Snowball-Star.

Built in 1875, the courthouse is a striking example of Victorian Italianate style. The upper two floors contain a museum of early Merced history whose highlights include ornate restored courtrooms and an 1870 Chinese temple with carved redwood altars.

A restored 1889 Victorian, "the Meux" contains furnishings typical of an upper-class household in early Fresno. The house's namesake, Thomas Richard Meux, was a Confederate army doctor during the Civil War who became a family practitioner after moving to Fresno. The Meux can be viewed on guided tours only.

The collection at the largest military museum west of the Mississippi includes Japanese, German, and American uniforms, German bayonets and daggers, a Japanese Namby pistol, a Gatling gun, and nearly 20,000 other items. The museum is also home of the Legion of Valor, dedicated to those who have received the nation's highest decorations for heroism and service. The staff is extremely enthusiastic.