Sunday, 9 September --- Admission Day (CA holiday)

The campground we were staying in had a truck with a body made out of a log. They do a lot of that sort of thing here. We passed a house made out of a single log, hollowed out. We didn't stop for that one.

We started the day by driving down the rest of the Avenue of the Giants. It's only 32 miles, but you can't go very fast, and wouldn't want to anyway. The experience when you get into a place with lots of trees is overwhelming. Gene tried to get some pictures, but you just can't squeeze it all into a little frame.

Trying to look up will just make you dizzy.

YumYum was a little intimidated by the trees

We stopped at the small town of Garberville (there are no large towns on this stretch of coast) and got Cokes for the road. Shortly thereafter we split off to take California 1 which starts (or ends) here. The top 22 miles of CA-1 were not what we had expected. You have to go through mountains (the bottom of the King Range?) and the road is narrow and extremely twisty. For the first 2/3 of the way there was not a straight section more than 100 yards, and some of the turns were hairpins. There is a sign at the beginning saying that motorhomes more than 40 feet should not try it. They aren't kidding. Sometimes we felt that we needed to be able to bend the van at 22 feet.

Finally we went around one last curve and suddenly found ourselves on the CA-1 of legend. The woods opened up to reveal the Pacific Ocean about 100 feet below us. The road wound along the edge of the cliff with the mountains to our left and the ocean to our right.





We stopped for lunch at an overlook, gazing out over the sunny, blue Pacific and listening to the surf break on the rocks far below us. A day like this is worth the whole trip.

Shortly after lunch, we got to Fort Bragg where, following advice from Gene's son Bruce, we turned right and drove down to Glass Beach. This is not a swimming beach, lots of rocks. But there was once allegedly a dump there and there is lots of wave-tumbled glass on the beach. We spent about an hour picking up glass, but all the pieces are very small so our finds are hardly impressive. Maybe we will find some better stuff later.

After stopping for fuel and groceries, we drove a few more miles and stopped for the night at Casper Beach RV Park. Not a very impressive park, but it has a beach which we will check out in the morning before pressing on to Mendocino and perhaps Napa Valley.