heading east at last

After spending the night in Half Moon Bay, we once again - for the last time - tackled the coast highway with its narrow roads, tight zigzag turns, and cliffs. We finally made it to the wider, flatter, straighter road to the town with no name. It is just a few miles beyond the entrance to the Hearst Castle, which we did not go to. It was too late at that point and we were ready to move on, with one exception, the next day.

We stayed at a nice motel with an attached restaurant and had our overall best meal and service since we've been on the road.

But the highlight was not that, nor surviving the drive. It was what the manager of the motel said to us when we were checking in.

At every motel they ask for a driver's license, credit card, home address, and phone number.

This check-in was no different until it came to the phone number.

She had Mike's license, credit card, and our street address in Essex Junction, Vermont. Then came THE question:

Do you have a phone number in this country?

The Monterey Aquarium. The city of Monterey is beautiful and seemingly rich. The houses along the shoreline are worth the drive. The famous Pebble Beach Golf Course is there. The Aquarium is hard to find. At the end, following the signs will lead you past it. Look for its blue logo to your right, not its name, as you approach the busiest downtown area from the northern loop. If you find yourself back in a residential area, you've gone too far. The Aquarium has a new Great White. It's female and quite young. Some of the other exhibits include sea otters, penguins, jelly fish, seahorses (one of Mike's favorites) and lots of stuff for all ages. The best way to show you the exhibits are through videos, but they are so memory intensive that I had to pick just a few to give you a sense of the place. Sorry about no pictures of the Great White. She stayed on the bottom of a very large tank which was dark and no flashes were allowed. US 1 along the coast with its cliffs and curves is not for the faint-hearted.

few words ... mostly pictures

Here's my latest version of catching up. (The logical side of my brain says that my computer problems are either because of me or signal strength or software peculiarities. The emotional side says that it just hates me and wants to play games with me. One quick example: very nice motel, ground floor room directly across from lobby, both wired and wireless options, tried everything for two hours, I connected to its service right away but it was IMPOSSIBLY slow. I went to the lobby. We checked everything we could from there. Trust me, I did it all. Couldn't use it. Manager offered me her computer. I declined, but brought my laptop to lobby where without doing anything it worked fine. Did minimal work there. Walked back to room where naturally the computer worked fine, having done nothing to it since I'd left the room.)

From Crescent City we headed to the California coast over the longest, windiest road imaginable - at least to me. Seriously, this was a beautiful but twisted drive. Mile after mile of countless 15 and 20 mph turns, climbing and climbing, then finally descending to the coast with the same super tight turns all the way down. At the bottom where it was straight for about 300 feet, I finally realized we were in the Twilight Zone. There was no coast. The road started climbing again! The whole thing repeated itself for another hour ... two hours ... five days? ... who knows.

Then we did make the coast. The town of Rockport, shown on Google, wasn't there and the coast highway was nearly as twisty as the previous drive. (Later we met people who had made the same drive, also looking for relief in Rockport, also not finding it.) It was beautiful, but it was bizarre.

We ended up staying in a different sort of motel near Fort Bragg ... the rooms were furnished with what appeared to be antique cabinets and desks, no phones, no ice machine, on a wooded hilltop, with semi-lit walking paths and statues and various decks and chairs, and an all night outdoor hot tub with no staff at the motel.

To add to our confusion, I'm hoping this was from being so tired, the next day I couldn't find the fort in Fort Bragg. Oops! Fort Bragg, the huge military post, is in North Carolina. Fort Bragg, CA, is just a town with that name. Others I spoke with made the same mistake.

Fort Bragg is, however, the home of the Skunk Train, a very cool ride and supposedly world famous. (It was featured in National Geographic many years ago. Even on this weekday after Labor Day, the train was at capacity.) It winds its way among redwoods (one of which is a thousand years old) to old lumber camps and a turnaround point about two hours into the trip. There is a concession car and grilled hamburgers, hot dogs, and more at the stop in the woods (not reachable by road) at the turnaround. There also is a flat car equipped with railings, so you can wander out there anytime (except when passing through the long unlit tunnel) and take great pictures in any direction.

From there, taking the advice of new friends, we took 208 inland through beautiful wine country. Again the road twisted and turned, not quite so much, but still a lot. Every vineyard offered free tastings. We were tempted, but the roads were so difficult and we were so tired that even a little bit of wine would not have been a good idea.

We stayed in Cloverdale and prepared for visiting San Francisco the next day. After changing our minds several times, we intended to stay one or two nights there, but the more we looked at our options and the more I studied the motels and tours, the more we second guessed ourselves. After reading many reviews and checking available rooms (there were very, very few) and their rates (generally $200-400 a night, usually with parking an additional $30 or so) along with some other reasons, we decided to take one of the tours. We were considering one of the open topped busses when it finally occurred to me that we had our own open topped vehicle, Mike's convertible, and that from my time here before and more importantly from the posted itineraries of the tour companies, we could take our own tour.

So that's what we did. Fog is a big part of the California coast and no where is it bigger than in the San Francisco area. As you can see it nearly obscured the Golden Gate bridge. Lastly, at one point in this trip the outside temperature was about 60 degrees. In about an hour as we headed inland it climbed into the 90's and then to 100 at around 3:00 in the afternoon. An hour's drive away, back on the coast, it was 57. Amazing.

Temporary post. Heading to San Francisco on Friday. Great train ride through some redwoods. Internet not working well enough to use for second day in a row. Will catch up. Apologies.

California and redwoods

California, we are here. I had forgotten that at the California border they stop everyone for an agricultural check: plants, fruit, firewood ... all can brings unwanted pests into Arnold's state. We've seen so many absolutely amazing things so far, both in nature and made by our fellow human beings. A few of them have been take-your-breath-away spectacular. The Badlands and the Pacific are a couple of examples. Others are so much fun and energizing - Horseshoe Curve, for example - that they vie for favoritism even against such competition. (I'm pretty darn sure that Mike's number one remains Horseshoe Curve. He's asleep, but I'll confirm that later.) As for me, I have a new favorite ... quite possibly my all time favorite place ever! Just typing these words seems inadequate and wrong, as though I am doing the place an injustice just trying to describe it. You are transported back to the time of dinosaurs or cave bears or sabre tooth tigers or more simply, the beginning of the world as we know it. Everything there seems ancient beyond description. Even the ferns that grow along the road seem to be a thousand years old ... and that is very, very new compared to the rest of the forest. This is not a place that has been much changed by human hands. Thick moss blankets many limbs and trunks and fallen giants. The bark and recesses and twists and hallows in the trunks speak of many stories never to be told. For those of you who know me, I am about to give the highest praise I can think of to this place: It is Middle Earth from the Lord of the Rings alive before your eyes. If you've never read LOTR (please do so if ever you have the chance), you can walk under these trees and know much of the wonder of the books without ever reading a word. I give up. Here's some pictures and videos. On the recommendation of a very nice person, we went on a relatively little known and very narrow dirt path (hardly can you call this a road, although vehicles travel in two directions on it; there are many places where you squeeze between trees with no more than two feet clearance on either side ... and that's while turning this way and that on this curvy way) through the Jedediah Smith Redwood Park near Crescent City, CA. Pictures never work trying to show what it's like standing beneath redwoods. The size, the height, the sheer mass and awesomeness doesn't translate to a two dimensional medium. Even with that qualifier, I feel the pictures I took fall far short of what I might have captured. But it's not the qualities I named above that are the biggest reasons for my thinking that this might be my favorite place on the planet. When you enter the old forest, you are in a different world. Picture info:

The coast video shows a "spout hole," much like the blowhole of a whale. At hide tides and storms, the water can shoot high into the air; here it only sprays a smoky mist 30' or so.

The sand dunes show the tracks of many of the vehicles that go over what we were told were world famous dunes.

The orange Kinney bag with the Pacific in the background is my saying hello to the lovely and helpful ladies of Kinney's back in Essex Junction. You all should be so lucky to have a pharmacy with people like this in your hometown.

another break

From Tokeland to Newport, Oregon is a gorgeous ride along the coast.

We spent some time at Lincoln Beach in Lincoln City, Oregon, which must be one of the biggest continuous beaches on the West Coast. I don't know any information other than my own eyes, both on this visit and one 37 years ago when I traveled cross country with my friend, Bill, to support this ... but I feel pretty sure it must be. It goes on and on and on.

There were large birds and at least one large sea going animal on the little tidal island across from us. (Can any of you identify them? How about you, Grace? Is the picture good enough, once you click on it, to tell me what other animals and birds are on that island shore? To readers who aren't Grace: Grace is our neighbor in Vermont and a very bright young lady. If I haven't lost track, she's a few months from turning four years old. She knows way more birds and bird songs than I do. She also carefully explained to her mom that the bighorn sheep that we took pictures of earlier in the trip can only be seen in the wild.)

We also stopped at a cheese making plant that says it produces the best on the West Coast. It's not bad, but it's not Cabot.

We tried to stay at the Sylvia Beach, which came with a great review from someone we met in Tokeland. It's an old hotel with all its rooms named after authors. Sylvia Beach was the owner of perhaps the most famous bookstore ever, Shakespeare & Co., in Paris.

There's no way to properly summarize its ongoing history on these pages, but if anyone of you has a special interest in writers and authors from one of the great ages of English writing, around 1925 to 1945, Google her or Shakespeare & Co. and be prepared to be awed. Anyway, there were no rooms available, except a dorm type situation, which is perfectly fitting with Shakespeare & Co. philosophy ... but not quite fitting with our trip's.

We ended up at the Shiloh, overlooking the Pacific. We stayed an extra here also, getting some things done: washing the car, sending our final big bin of extra clothes home to make room to easily lower the top of the convertible whenever we want to, adjusting the pressure of the car tires, resting a little more, and discussing whether we might head inland to Crater Lake - which we finally decided not to do ... we're going to continue down the coast and hopefully visit a redwood forest tomorrow afternoon in northern California.

We've been getting a little better coffee with half-and-half on the coast and had some interesting and tasty meals. Be warned, however, that whatever they call their breakfast potatoes out here, they come out as hash browns. No home fries. Not yet anyway.

Long ago I swam in big waves in the Pacific. I thought I was going to do that today, but the waves seems more powerful and there is a rip current out there and I'm just not who I was, so I got about waist deep, got hit by a couple of decent waves and called it a day.

I'll let pictures and videos tell the rest of the story.

We made it

We are taking a break, staying an extra day at a small but nice motel, The Tradewinds, on the Shoalwater Bay Reservation (so small, it's not listed as such on Google maps) in Tokeland, WA. It's located on a little traveled coastal loop south of Seattle. It's also an area that lies low against the Pacific and has many Tsunami Evacuation Route signs. We have been warned that the Native American police, who are the law here, strictly enforce the speed limits. We have carefully obeyed all traffic laws, but it's clear that they are vigilant and active. There is also a small casino nearby that Mike and I went to for its all-you-can-eat Friday buffet. It cost $9.99 each and here are some of the choices: two kinds of crab legs
cold shrimp
fried breaded shrimp
mussels
clams
fried chicken
breaded fish
salad bar
rich cakes and pies
fruit and lots more

Just for a break and the fun of it, we took a ferry out of Seattle, after visiting the famous Pike Street market in the morning ... going partway there on the monorail from the 1962 World's Fair.

Yes, indeed, they throw fresh fish over the counters, as some of you might have seen on one of several TV shows. But what surprised us was all the booths with all the varieties of goods from local berries, beautiful flowers (at hard-to-believe low prices) to ... well, just about anything and everything.

[Note: two things while I remember - I've had to edit my blog entries quite a few times after I've posted an entry because a word I've used is too long to fit in the margin besides the photos. It throws the wrapping of the narration off. Hyphenating does no good as it appears differently on different computer screens. If there's a fix for this, I haven't been able to find it. So my writing is not necessarily what comes naturally, but what fits in the margins. The other thing is that Mike and I just had our first good cup of coffee since crossing the Mississippi. The coffee is just not up to our standards and very rarely is real half-and-half available. It's either a liquid substitute or powdered creamer. Our theory is that that is how Starbucks got started in Seattle. The coffee was so bad that when Starbucks started serving decent coffee, the change was so startling that word of mouth gave them all the momentum they needed to sweep the West and carry through to the rest of the country.]

The ride on the huge ferry, the longest they offer, zigzagged us through Puget Sound and some islands and sea otters and seals (which, sadly, I did not capture on camera). I did get our best pictures yet of Mount Rainier, even though it was about 80 miles away. Just now Mike and I were out on the balcony with the 18x binoculars looking at what must be giant waves on the horizon. It's so hard to tell, but relative to the fishing boats, I'd say they could easily be 20' or more from crest to trough. Probably more, as I was in 16' waves many years ago and these seem so much bigger.

For Mr. Kelly's class:

The picture of Mount Rainier taken from Puget Sound made me think of a math problem that about which Mr. Kelly needs to double check my thinking. Let's suppose you were on a boat at sea level as I was. And let's suppose, as is the case is some awesome places in this world, there were some very tall mountains running steeply down to the water's edge. Suppose you and some friends knew you were about four miles from one of the mountain tops. Now let's say you were at a railing on the boat pointing right at that mountain top and wondering aloud how high that mountain was. Quickly one of your friends, a few feet away from you and also on the railing, looked at you as you were pointing at the mountain top and asking the question. Right away she said, "That mountain is about ____________ above sea level." She was right. How did she know that with only the information given above available to her?