california dreaming...

Sept. 28, 2013

This morning we enjoyed a delightful breakfast at our hotel, they even had 2 different flavours of waffles. We rolled out at about 8:45am with Crescent City pinned as our first pit stop, which was about 2 hours down the coast. We got out of the car to take a few pics of the coastline, but it was super windy and raining a bit, and the rain was all blowing and pointy, so we didn’t linger. We did stop at a few other viewpoints along the coast for photo ops, but the weather continued to be not so great.

Finally we reached the California border; I had assumed that as soon as we crossed the state line it would be sunny and beautiful and hot (not unreasonable in my mind). Low and behold, this was not the case and it continued to be cloudy and drizzly. One thing we noticed pretty much as soon as we entered California is all the roadkill. I’m not sure if it’s a case of no one cleaning it up or if Californian animals are more prone to hanging out on busy highways and waiting for cars to come by.

We have been following highway 101 all the way down the coast, and in California it passes through the Redwood National Park, where we found huge statues of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe. There was a speaker somewhere with a guy talking to everyone taking pictures pretending to be Paul Bunyan, which was funny and I thought it would be the perfect job for Ben.

We found a great beach to run around on before the highway took us inland and away from the ocean. Of course we headed right to the water’s edge to see how far the waves were washing up on shore so we could get our feet wet. I guess I underestimated how far up the beach the water would reach and I couldn’t run back up the beach fast enough, so my pants got wet up to my knees. Luckily I was wearing yoga pants so they dried pretty quick. Ben thought it was pretty funny.

We continued on through Eureka (where we saw one of many little coffee stands), and headed into Humboldt Redwoods State Park. 

We opted to take the scenic route off the highway and onto the “Avenue of the Giants” (Ben thought this is where he would find his “people”, it was of course referring to the trees). It was so beautiful and the trees were amazingly huge, some of them had survived forest fires and had singed bark.

Just outside of the park, Ben pulled over so that I could take over driving for a bit. It was a little stressful since I am not very good at driving manual transmission, but I managed without incident.

 I got us all the way to Santa Rosa (about 2hrs) and then traffic was getting busier and I decided it was Ben’s turn to drive again. He drove us the rest of the way to Fairfield, where we are staying the night. We chose Fairfield because this is where the Jelly Belly factory is so we are going to do a tour tomorrow before heading back to the coast. Ben booked us a hotel room through Ebates by doing some low-ball bidding thing, and we ended up in a smoking room. Pretty nasty stuff, so we opened the window (to better hear a barking dog) and brewed a pot of coffee to create more strong smells. Our hotel is right next to a bunch of fast food restaurants so we went to a close by pizza place for dinner and sat at a booth that had its own little TV playing Despicable Me. The pizza was actually better than expected plus we have some leftover for snacking in the car tomorrow.