Greetings from near Bass Lake, California! Alicia and I are on the road, headed to High Sierra Music Festival near Quincy, CA. It’s been an exciting and awe-inspiring few days. Sunday morning we got up and went to the Willow Creek Bigfoot Museum – the reason we stayed in Willow Creek. There wasn’t much to the museum; just a lot of maps, plaster feet, and a video that analyzed supposed bigfoot sightings that were caught on camera. The score of the museum for Alicia was the bigfoot Cinderella story. The 1st grade at Alicia’s school teaches Cinderella stories from around the world so she now has a new story to add to the unit. From Willow Creek we headed south down the 101 – stopping for brunch at Amy’s Delight, a small restaurant in Eureka. Amy cooked us a delicious breakfast. Driving further south we made it to the Avenue of Giants – a stretch of highway where the largest Redwoods reside. They were even bigger than the ones in the National Park. We climbed ten foot stumps, went through fallen trees, and climbed on fallen trees. There was even a fallen redwood that was split in half because another redwood fell down on top of it. We saw the immortal tree which as survived fires, floods, and lumberjacks, and further down the road we paid $6 to drive through a redwood. It was tight but my car made it through. You really do feel tiny standing next to these trees. Even the ferns with massive. If you outstretched the branch of the fern, some came to be over six feet tall. Alicia kept expecting us to stumble upon dinosaurs but I was more on the lookout for Ewoks. Like most places we’ve seen I would highly recommend driving through the Avenue of Giants.
In Leggett, CA we turned on to California 1 – the most winding road I’ve ever had the pleasure of driving on. We wound our way up a mountain, down a mountain, up another mountain, down the backside of that mountain and then wound our way down the beautiful California coast. We stopped near Fort Bragg, CA at Glass Beach. The story is that people used to dump their trash in the ocean and because of the rocks and swirling waters, the trash didn’t wash out to sea. The glass in the trash broke down and washed ashore creating a beautiful green, brown, and white pebbly beach. We were expecting the class to be covered in large chunks of smooth, colorful glass, but that was not really the case. Maybe at one point it was closer to the description, but there were just small chunks of glass mixed in with the sand. Years of scavengers, I’d assume. The bright green glass was still beautiful shimmering in the sun. We were also able to climb on the jagged rocks jutting out the ocean. I prefer the NC beaches because of the warm temps and large expanses of sandy, swimmable beaches, but the California coast is breathtakingly gorgeous. We continued down the coast towards Salt Point State Park, our campsite for the night, looking for something to eat. There aren’t too many people living on the coast in Northern California, so our food options were limited, but we eventually came to a Mexican restaurant. I had El Campequena or beef, bacon, and shrimp on tortillas. Ron Swanson would be jealous. Right as it was getting dark we made it to our campsite, happy that it wasn’t going to rain.
Monday morning we got up and continued down California 1 to San Francisco. We stopped at the Marin Headlands to view the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a frigid 58 degrees up top, but we got a pretty good view of the slightly foggy bridge. We then paid $6 to cross the bridge before checking into our hotel, which was somewhere between a hotel and a hostel. We had a more hotelesque room that was decorated in a Victorian style. Definitely the coolest hotel so far. We took a street car down to Fisherman’s Wharf for some delicious yet overpriced seafood. We then took the bus to the Castro District so we could walk over to Haight Ashbury. The Castro district was probably the one place on the trip where Alicia wasn’t the one getting checked out. We arrived too late in Haight Ashbury to go into many of the vintage clothing shops, so we settled on pizza. The next morning we did a quick drive though Chinatown. San Francisco is definitely a place we want to go back to. We just need more than an afternoon to do it justice.
From San Francisco we were supposed to go to our campsite at Bass Lake, just south of Yosemite, but instead we decided we would squeeze in Sequoia National Park and take in General Sherman – the world’s largest tree by volume. It was quite big, but the redwoods were more impressive. Sequoias don’t grow as tall as redwoods, but sequoias do get thicker.
On the 4th we got up and drove to Yosemite National Park. As expected it was full of people but the views, like most of the other great National Parks, were breathtaking. We drove to Glacier Point first, which gives you a straight ahead, eye level, view of Half-Dome. We also had a clear view of the Yosemite Valley down below. While in California we’ve seen nothing but California license plates but have heard very little English. At an information sign for Glacier Point we heard a French couple practicing saying glacier in English: Glass-ee-air. We then drove down to the valley and saw the huge rock monoliths and walls from the ground level. I haven’t spent much time contemplating glaciers, but because of this trip I now have a new respect for them. They’re the world’s greatest artists. It was nice spending the 4th of July in one of America’s most beautiful parks. It was relaxing and wasn’t nearly as crowded as I had anticipated. It was also neat spending the day with the Germans, Japanese, and French. Flamboyant patriotism isn’t my idea of fun…though I might have gotten used it if we had stayed at Bass Lake for the day.
Bass Lake was one crazy place on the 4th. Every conceivable spot on the side of road was jam packed with cars. Some spots were forced and those cars were still there this morning. Hispanics and whites alike took to the shore for a day of boating, swimming, and picnicking with families. The weather was perfect: in the upper 80’s and sunny. I’m very glad we went to Yosemite but spending the day at Bass Lake wouldn’t have been an awful alternative. We cooked our seafood fettuccini alfredo – probably the only people eating that – and then went down about 20 feet to the lake to watch the fireworks. Unfortunately our campsite was about 4 miles from where they shot of the fireworks and the fireworks didn’t crest the tree line. We did see the sky turn red and blue behind the trees and were lucky enough to see the grand finale barely make it over the trees. I was able to get one picture. Alicia and I then took a night time dip before going to bed.
High Sierra here we come!
No comments:
Post a Comment