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Highway 1
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We woke up to the sound of the sea, the distant foghorn of the Bodega lighthouse, and the steady drizzle being broken by a sudden downpour of hail – at atmospheric welcome to the North California coast.
And in the daylight, the campsite turned out to be in quite a spectacular location – a long arcing sandy spit, protecting the bay, with fog, rain clouds and patches of blue sky clouds battling it out across the sky. Exploring the dunes, we found wild beach strawberrys for breakfast and big fat Banana slugs – baby Jabba the Huts, apparently. We drove around to the other end of the bay and spotted gray whales from the headland, stopped for a bowl of clam chowder and a loaf of fresh crusty sourdough (it won us all over) while a sealion swam about the harbour in front of us. Highway 1 twists and turns to literally hug the ocean pretty much all the way up the coast, and in some places you are only feet from the dropping off into the sea. It’s a wild, weatherworn coastline, twisted Monterey pines and eroding seacliffs, black sand and shingle beaches covered in driftwood. There are little beaches, coves and state parks all the way along the coast, so we stopped early to make the most of the clearing weather – a quiet campsite overlooking the ocean through the trees and the kids broke out their homework in the afternoon sunshine. That left us with a lot of miles to make up the next day, so we got started early – stopping for brunch for a walk around the Gualala headland, and got talking to a ranger who explained how to tell our seals from our sealions, and that the strange birdcalls around our campsite last night were actually a bunch of feral peacocks – and not mythical South American rainbow snipe. After a quick supply stop in Mendocino for supplies – a quaint little coastal village which must have the highest ratio of artisan bakeries, breweries and cheesemakers per head of population in the world – we carried onto the Humboldt redwoods. It was just so dark and gloomy in the rain beneath the canopy of ancient redwood, though, we decided to continue on and up the coast. It’s always the little things that confound you in your travels. Tired and hungry, we stopped for a takeaway family pizza in Eureka – only to have it served up raw – ‘ah, could you cook it for me?’, ‘I’m sorry, sir, we don’t do that here’… We drove on, and after a bit of getting lost along the way, got in late to camp on the Elk Prairie in the redwoods national park – still raining…. |
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