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.