The Long and Winding Road

 

We found our way back onto the open road, after a tangle of metropolitan freeways! We will get to that, but first, the obligatory photos, and some parting comments for the Bay Area:

A beautiful Berkeley moment.

We visited Stanford. We thought about it. "No, we don't have $55, 000 a year to spend on schooling," we concluded.

A filthy, dirty children's book we found at Berkeley Earth Day.*

*Note: "Fanny" does NOT mean "bottom" in New Zealand.

Goodbye, Alameda!

A very special thank you to our hosts in Alameda, and to Osa, for tolerating all of our entrances and exits. Here she is, a special feature in this entry:

What a ham!

Bye, Osa!

Before departing, we did what every intrepid traveler must do: stacked up on gummy bears, pretzels, Easter candy, and (most importantly), root beer. In teensy little cans.

Suitably equipped with sweets, we headed out. Here's what our drive looked like, up the Pacific Coast Highway:

 

 We were lucky to have such glorious weather, as many have informed us that they have been cursed with an unusually large rainfall in the area, all year.

Steff:
 Operation Boycott-Overpriced-and-Under-maintained-California-State-Park-Campsites was successful! 

We woke at 8 (in the campsite) to muted light filtering down through the redwood canopy.

The trees appeared black, silhouetted against the morning light. Colours started to appear as the light grew, reddish brown trunks, green foliage, blue sky. Now there is a solar wake-up call that this non-morning person can deal with.

A hot cooked breakfast is the best antidote to the bitter cold.

We had a brief, chilly, quarter-powered shower and left behind schedule at noon. We stopped on Avenue of the Giants and walked part of a loop track into the redwoods.  

Avenue of the Giants. As seen through our reflective front windshield.

It was wonderful, quiet, damp, cool. Much more spacious than New Zealand bush. Perhaps these are more mature forests than our ferny, tangled proto-forest. This forest held so much life, and the energy from the flora was tangible, peaceful. Huge trees were surrounded by other ancient giants, which had toppled and were rotting on the forest floor. Dense redwoods, along with being old (one particular tree with a 9-foot diameter was approximately 800 years old), rot very slowly, releasing their nutrients back to the soil over hundreds of years.

We continued our journey through the redwoods. It is here, in Humboldt, that we learned the noble "Redwood Rap". Here's a sample verse:

"For millions of years, these tree have been chillin'
After lots of loggin' these trees are really illin'
'Cuz after many years of hackin' and hackin'
There ain't many left, they're really lackin'"

No, we didn't make them up. Here are some such redwoods. Just chillin'.

Nancy:
I had a great day today. For a start, I wasn't mauled by bears last night (apparently there are a few left in this forest), and I woke up this morning intact and well. 

We departed at twelve and drove for six and a half hours. In that time, we:
-went for a stroll among the redwoods

 -spotted a banana slug (and submitted it to amateur photography)
-listened to Phoebe Snow, Cat Stevens, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Jimmy Buffett, and Butterbeans and Susie; sang very loudly
-Made an ambiguous friendship with some motorists from Quebec (they followed us for about 30 miles, in spite of our excruciating uphill crawl; when they passed us, they flashed us a note from their front window, but we couldn't read it. Canadian friends, if you're reading this, what were you trying to tell us?!)
-Arrived in Oregon and had someone else pump our gas for us (it's illegal for us to do it)

-Ate a LOT of ice cream (mmm, Haagen Dazs) and gummy bears, and washed it down with some root beer--don't worry, teeth, I'll brush twice in compensation
-Were nearly blown off the road by gusty onshore breezes, and tooted at twice by angry motorists
-Arrived in a forest at Cape Blanco (where?) in coastal Oregon (somewhere). 

Life, I do believe we're living you.

Love,
Nancy

  We farewelled April at Beverly Beach (LA 44, LONG -124, approximately. We know this, because we had to go to the camp's information centre to figure out where we actually were, having picked a campsite at random when we tired of driving). The drive on the 30th was not as exciting as the previous day; lots of straight lines and forest. What we had initially thought of as ruggedly beautiful quickly turned into tolerably mundane. Trees. More trees. The odd lake. That is, until we happened upon the ocean (o hai, oshun!). There is something so majestic and captivating about the ocean: it is relentlessly fascinating. Whereas even the most gorgeous forest can rapidly grow old, we could happily drive along the coast for hours.

So, besides driving through forest and past quaint coastal towns, what did we do on April 30th? We avoided being tourist-trapped into paying a $12 a head to see some sea lions in their natural habitat. How's this for a rip-off scheme? Charge tourists far too much to view something you don't even need to feed or maintain--no overheads, bonus!

Here is Steff, defiantly NOT looking at the sea lions.

We arrived, after five long days of driving, in Bay City, OR. Along the way, we noticed this:

It appears that Oregon's homeless population are an industrious bunch. While a lot of the Californian homeless were seated, or traveled slowly via shopping cart, we saw hordes of Oregonian bums walking or biking along the highway. Slowly, quickly, up and downhill, south, north (and possibly east and west--we don't know, because we're not going that way). They're fit, this lot.

That's all for now, folks.

Until next time!

-Your intrepid journeywomen


The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.