Day 10: 8/18/14
Bodega Bay
Mileage: No drive day! Kind of…
People:2
Dogs: 2
Bodega Bay: where they filmed
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I can only imagine that the kindhearted
individuals of Bodega Bay were trying to recreate some of the film’s original
feel when they covered our beach adjacent campground in bird seed. It was like
animal planet in our camp; very tiny, irritating animal planet. Each campsite
was surrounded by bushes, which made them both secluded, and the perfect spot
for every bird in town to roost. The sounds of the birds’ aerial attacks and
the neighborhood cat kept the dogs going crazy all night. We were a little beached out at this point,
and it was another foggy, grey morning on the coast so we went into town,
grabbed some incredibly yummy coffee and headed into Wine Country for a little
tasting. We visited a place called, Locals, in Sonoma County. Being the classy
lady I am, I rolled up wearing my Toms, khaki hiking pants, and a Ben &
Jerry’s tshirt imprinted with the phrase: I like to spoon. We tasted (for FREE)
a million different kinds of delicious wines from over 10 different wineries,
got “lunch drunk”, which is a rich white lady term for drunk at lunch, but in a
very snooty way, bought a few bottles of our favorites, and stopped at the wood
fired pizza place next door for lunch because they let us use their (clean)
bathrooms. Turns out, lunch was delicious! We headed back to bird camp,
relaxed, ate dinner, and again, yelled at the dogs all night for barking at
noises outside the tent.
Interesting
fact about Bodega Bay, while its claim to fame is having hosted Alfred and his
film crew, nothing left actually looks like it did in the movie. This seems
silly to me because if the one thing that made your tiny spot on the map famous
was the way it looked in an old movie, wouldn’t you keep it that way?
Apparently not. Though, the local gas stations and corner stores are filled
with kitschy trinkets and photos of what it used to look like during filming.
My favorite were the plaques that say things like, “Tippie Hendersen stood here
right before the school children were mauled to death by seagulls.” We are
adding this movie to the top of our Netflix que as soon as we get home.
Day 11: 8/19/14
Bodega Bay to Eureka, home of Cuddles, the cutest baby I
know
Mileage: Doesn’t seem that long while you’re snacking on
leftover sourdough bread…
People:2
Dogs: 2
Continuing
up PCH to Eureka, I got carsick for the first time in my life. Signs on the
road signaling sharp turns actually displayed U-turn type arrows, which we
laughed at, until the laughing stopped... After the juices in my stomach
sloshed back and forth for a while, my brain couldn’t keep up and it was time
to route off the road or christen the car with my own puke. Brandon being the
loving car owner he is, decided to reroute us and plugged in different
coordinates. Joke’s on me, because every time we thought we were routing off
the highway, the GPS would mockingly chime: continue on Highway 1 for 40 more
miles, or something ridiculous like that.
In
between swells of nausea, I noticed a rather weird thing about California:
coastal ranching. Precariously perched along the cliffs of Pacific Coast
Highway was herd after herd of cattle with the best view in the country. They
looked like they were going to just drop right off the side of the earth.
After
winding through the southern part of Humbolt County’s redwood forest, the road
straightened out a bit, the car remained vomit free, and we pulled into Joan
& Nick’s in Eureka. Also of note, along the way we saw a black fluffy lump
in the highway, we assumed to be a dead bear and when I told this to Joan, she
suggested it may be a homeless person.
Eureka
in Humbolt County, used to be a Northern California logging town. Now it is a
wasteland filled with the homeless, drugged out hippies, a hospital, and my
friend Joan & her family. Joan works as a nurse at the local hospital, Nick
is a photojournalist working on a multimedia project about the town’s homeless,
and Cuddles is their super cute baby that’s only 6 weeks old. They also have a
polydactyly cat named Thumbs, and two other cats that look like the same cat:
Little Cat and Tiny Cat. Joan is not a creative person. Also, I side with Nick
on this one, you should’ve gotten the yellow cat, Joan. Who needs two cats that
look the same?
Once
settled and showered, we watched a ridiculous amount of mind numbingly crappy
TV, ate pretty good pizza, and snuggled Cuddles until I went to sleep in a BED.
Amazing.
Day 12: 8/20/14
Eureka!
Mileage: No Driving!
People: 4
Dogs: 2
Baby: 1
Today
for the second day in a row, I showered. It was great. Joan & Nick, being
the wonderful hosts they are, drove us to Humbolt Redwoods State Forest. The
home of Giant Tree. It is appropriately named, being 363 feet tall. Seeing the
Redwoods National Forest just may be the highlight of the trip for me. (For
Brandon its the driving. He just loves all the driving.) I think the best
sights to see are those that can’t be contained in a photograph. These trees
are over 1000 years old and so tall that we are dwarfed in their shadows. It
was impossible to capture one tree from ground to top. The air on the forest
floor was crisp & clean, and when you could get away from other people,
silent. If you stood there long enough you could hear these ancient trees
creaking in the wind. There is something very special about this place.
We went
back home for continued baby snuggles and Nick showed us the project he’s
working on. For a while now, he’s been chronicling the life of the homeless in
Eureka as they battle drugs, alcohol, & illness. Check out his work at www.adamsvisuals.com. A friend of theirs
travels the world photographing rich kids on vacation and they gave me one of
his animal prints for my office. In typical Joan fashion, it’s a very nicely
framed photo of a baboon’s butt & testicles. The card, also in typical Joan
fashion read, “You’re the boss of the doctors. Always remember, you’ve got
balls.” It’s a sweet touching pep talk in her own disturbing way. It will make
a nice addition to my office.
Day 13: 8/21/14
Eureka continued
Mileage: Who cares? I’m not driving
People: 4
Dogs: 2
Baby: 1
Today I
took another shower! and we rolled out to tour Eureka. We stopped at a local
yarn store and I bought super soft & fluffy locally spun & dyed alpaca
yarn. OOOooooo. After what Brandon describes as “too much time in a yarn store”
we walked to the harbor and had some great ice cream and watched the employees
make homemade waffle cones. If I had
this capability at home, everything we ate would be served in a waffle cone.
We left
Eureka and ventured north to visit the hippie town of Arcata. Filled. With.
Hippies. Everybody’s high. Nobody does anything. I am not sure how the loafing
hippie lifestyle is sustained. Nick swears the secret is local, daily meals at
the food pantries/homeless shelters. The highlight of Arcata is the hippie
co-op. This place is pretty cheap and filled with amazing bulk items. You can
pick up a jar, hold it under the spout, press a button, and peanuts are ground
into peanut butter, filling the jar right before your eyes! They have vats of
bulk honey. You can buy bulk, safe for the environment dish soap & laundry
detergent. They sell bouquets of flowers with dahlias the size of your face for
$7.99. Had this been my first and only encounter buying things in California, I
would have probably stayed forever. However, this seems to be the only place we
could actually afford to buy anything and they don’t sell gas. Did I mention
the most expensive gas we found was in Big Sur for $5.79 a gallon? In. Sane. We
left with a few snacks and headed back for another night of wonderfully mind
numbing TV watching and then slept in a comfy bed. Disclaimer: Brandon would
not allow me to buy anything in bulk. We apparently had an appropriate amount
of peanut butter already.
Thank you.
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