June 26 - 27, 2024 - Lafe and Faith's Odyssey

Big Trees and Little Beaches

In the morning, we woke to a slightly less cloudy scene from when the sun set. We got up and headed back down to the beach to take another look at the seals who had hardly moved an inch since we last saw them. We hadn’t really seen much of Redwood NP yet, so we drove south and into one of the major areas of the park. Our first stop was at the aptly named Big Tree, a gigantic Redwood the size of which was hard to grasp. We wandered through some more such trees before heading to our next destination. We got out of the van, looked at the closed visitor center, then grabbed a map and figured out where we wanted to go next. Our hike for the day was a couple mile loop through some gorgeous old growth redwoods and past a rather unimpressive set of waterfalls called Trillium Falls. The trees were spectacularly large and the forest itself was incredibly beautiful if a bit jungle-y for my taste. Pictures really don’t do the trees justice; they are so large that all you really see are wooden columns stretching into the heavens when you look around. If you do decide to crane your neck back, you see their many branches creating a green canopy far, far above your head. The forest also supports a healthy population of salmonberry bushes, so we collected a few of their fruits to eat. Salmonberries aren’t exactly delicious; they have the look and feel of firm raspberries without any of the taste. We continued on driving down through beautiful forest and wooden giants before getting to an actually open visitor center and got the mandatory postcard before continuing down the road.

We drove through the largest town in the area, Eureka, CA, and found the town to be rather lacking in anything interesting, so we kept on going until we found something interesting: a rock shop. It wasn’t just any rock shop, it was also a museum of several lifetimes of collecting rocks from all over the world. The shop was really cool, but night was approaching and we still needed to find somewhere to sleep. We stopped to make dinner in Rio Dell, which only reinforced our notions about the whole area. Humboldt county isn’t exactly the best place in the world, and the towns reflected that. They were pretty run down, a lot of homeless wandered the streets and highways, and we overheard some locals talking about how they wouldn’t walk across town alone during the day. Yikes. So, we kept going down the road into the Humboldt Redwoods State Park. We found a very secluded pull off amidst a grove of big trees to stay for the night. Just beyond the trees was a rocky riverside that we explored for a while before heading back to the van. While we were down there, a ranger pulled up and parked on the shore; we thought that we were going to be sent packing, but he left a few minutes later and didn’t so much as wave to us. We went to sleep: me uneasily and Faith like a rock. We awoke in the morning to nothing new and no bumps in the night.

We got up and started looking for a coffee shop to work at. We came across several that were missing one or more of our three requirements for working:

Wall plugs
Seating
Wifi

This was very disappointing, but we still managed to get some work done at a little place in Fort Bragg, CA. To get there, we exited Highway 101 onto Highway 1 and went down what is probably the longest incredibly windy and steep road I’ve been on. Normally, I really don’t mind such roads, but this one was obnoxious for several reasons: the cars on it were driving too fast and up my tailpipe the entire time, there was a lot of roadwork, it was a tree tunnel the entire way, and it was just too darn long. Needless to say, I was happy when we emerged onto the coast. The road was still steep and windy, but not nearly as much as it had been in the Coast Range. After my laptop died in the first cafe we could find (due to no wall plug), we headed over to the Sea Glass Beach to peruse the sea glass, something that Faith loves to collect. I expected to see a few more bits of sea glass than normal, but there was an astounding amount of sea glass all over the beach. You’d look down and not realize that every bit of “sand” beneath your feet was actually countless itty-bitty pieces of sea glass, mostly clear, brown, and green. We collected a good number of small pieces before getting some fresh meat and vegetables and continuing our drive south along the coast. We stopped at a few beaches, including the Navarro Beach, what a passerby told us was an incredibly beautiful beach. To be honest, they all pretty much look the same: rocky, golden grasses and evergreens on the hills, and a sandy beach with lots of driftwood. At one of the beaches, we stopped to make an exquisite dinner of beef cutlets, onion, bell pepper, zucchini, squash, and mushroom. It was amazing, to say the least. The only downside was that we used a new propane container and apparently screwed the top on too hard as the valve would not seal properly. Although unfortunate, we spied a couple just down the way who were about to use their matching set of stove and gas to make dinner. I jogged over and offered them our container with a warning of its deficiency. They were okay with it, and we left them to it. We didn’t hear an explosion as we drove off, so we assume they are still alive and well. We kept going along the coast until we found a lovely pull off above a beach that we called our own for the night. We got a good night’s rest but were awoken a couple times by people honking heir horns as they drove past. Apparently, not everyone is a fan of people sleeping in their vans and taking up valuable pull off space.