Placerville

I give Placerville points for several reasons - it is cute, western, railroad-style, and has a really good Mexican restaurant. The downtown scene is small and it is easy to walk from end to end, and they have an abnormal amount of karaoke bars (which is always a good thing, in my mind). The Cary House is a decent in-town hotel that has the second oldest elevator in the country, so there is some fun history there.

But perhaps more importantly, none of this matters if you show up after 8 PM on weekdays, maybe earlier. The town has been entirely shut down almost every time I have been here, weekends or weekdays, daylight hours and after dark. This presents a problem for Tahoe weekend traffic, which is the majority of the traffic in this town. But I suppose it works for some, because enough people seem to populate the local Starbucks every morning...