Thu 29 Aug – Sun 01 Sep 2019
We left Patrick’s Point State Park in the late morning, stopped for lunch overlooking the attractive Trinidad fishing harbour dotted with small craft, and took a brief spell on the main Highway 101 to ‘leg it’ to Leggett, before deviating onto quiet, coastal Highway 1. Within seconds, Highway 1 began twisting sharply downhill towards the coast through redwood forest interspersed with stands of sweet-smelling eucalyptus, whose perfume made its way into our car even through the air vents.
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] View from Little River Rock over Luffenholtz Beach County Park.
San Francisco was still 300 miles away on a slow, scenic route and we had a day and a half to get there. Correspondingly, we kept the pace on, but made sure to pause occasionally and get out of the car. Sometimes, this was for viewpoints such as Little River Rock above the cliff-backed beach of Luffenholtz Beach County Park in Trinidad Bay, to see some of the more than 20,000 small islands, islets, rock stacks, pinnacles and exposed reefs that dot the 1100 mile long Californian coast and form the California Coastal National Monument. Sometimes, it was more prosaic such as braving the ugliness and stink of Eureka for fuel.
However, I can never bring this journey to mind without remembering the bag of boiled sweets that we had bought to stave off motion sickness whilst map reading on the winding coast road. The sweets sat in the bag looking enticingly like an assortment of fruit-flavoured, boiled sweets, lemon sherberts, brittle toffee candies and peppermints. In reality, they were foul (I suppose that made them the perfect sweets: you only took on the calories if truly desperate). One of the sweets tasted like a mixture of orange, caramel, herbs, medicine and mustiness. The remainder weren’t as tasty.
Poppy made us laugh as she pored over the California map trying to identify the location of one of California’s oldest national parks, home of El Capitan and Half Dome. Exasperated, she finally gave up and exploded, “Where on earth is Yes Emitty? I can’t find it at all. Is it anywhere near Yosemite [pronounced Yo’s Might]?"
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] Surfwood campground in MacKerricher State Park, and some other campsite guests.
In the evening, we reached MacKerricher State Park, just north of Fort Bragg, where we planned to stay overnight following the recommendation of a motorcyclist we’d met near the start of our USA trip. We pulled into Surfwood campground and were lucky to find a perfect (if rather expensive) pitch nestled amongst modestly sized azalea trees, available for just one night prior to every pitch being booked solid from tomorrow for the Labour Day holiday weekend. What a perfect location to end 68 nights of camping in our (slightly leaky) tent out of our 6 months of world travels.
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] Boardwalk out to a seal watching station near Surfwood campground.
The ocean was 3 minutes away along an attractive boardwalk to a wild seal watching station and, after the girls had eagerly and independently pitched the tent, we went for a short dusk stroll to see if there was anything afoot. Plenty of seals were in evidence and one particularly well-paid exhibitionist spent ages frolicking and cavorting in a large, rocky sea pool for the benefit of the handful of silent, shadowy spectators.
Bears, cougars and raccoons were noted to be potential nuisance animals at this campsite. As we locked all our food away, I briefly wondered about leaving the bag of boiled sweets out: one taste of those and wild animals would never again bother humans for food.
As night fell, we saw bats and winged swarmer termites and enjoyed another little campfire when yet more lovely neighbours gave the girls some wood, in fact more than we could use. Just making kindling (by smashing wood together) and getting the campfire built and lit must have been enough to warm the girls as they promptly disappeared into the tent, leaving Dave and me to enjoy the toasty fire under chilly, starlit skies, sat on upturned, split firewood logs as rustic stools. We listened to the crackling fire and, beyond that, to the softly surging and falling ocean waves, and I was transfixed as I saw a shooting star, the first and last of this trip.
Next morning, we decamped very thoroughly in readiness for our upcoming flight home, brushed out the inside of the car and found a family to give our remaining, unused cooking gas to. We neatly stacked our spare wood, kindling and sheets of newspaper by the firepit as a welcome gift for the next incumbents of the pitch. And we still managed to leave the campsite just after 9:30 a.m., which gave us a few minutes for another quick jaunt out to watch the seals. Most were lolling about, but two very cheeky youngsters gave a real aquatic display as they played and leapt over each other continuously.
Scenic Highway 1 was a little busier until route 128 turned off inland, but then became very quiet again and we had the slow-going, twisting coastal route pretty much to ourselves. The landscape around us became drier and the sun warmer. The various habitations that we passed were brightly decorated with large drifts of stately, lily-like, mid-pink flowers on long, bare stalks – known as ‘naked ladies’ in California (and by other names elsewhere, such as Madonna lily in Italy and ‘girls going to school’ in Spain).
Having missed the sea lions at Patrick’s Point, we decided to head out to a place called Sea Lion Rocks that we found on our map just north of Point Arena. It was a beautiful spot, where we lunched alone on low grassy bluffs overlooking a small sea cave and arch, turkey vultures wheeling at eye level just ahead of us. But any sea lions remained elusive.
We passed Gualala Point Regional Park with its redwoods and fragrant bay laurels and Salt Point State Park, then had a very brief stop for a view of hundreds of brown pelicans crowded onto a low, sandy spit at the mouth of the Russian River just north of Jenner.
At the small town of Bodega Bay, we treated ourselves to a short stop for ice creams and, just as we were leaving town, I glanced across to the ocean and spotted a dozen sea lions floating and playing in the water, one waggling its flipper at me. I shouted for us to pull over – we had finally got our sea lion sighting.
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] Church, schoolhouse and a smattering of other buildings in Bodega, the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds. Many of the houses had the false parapet fronts characteristic of the old American ‘wild west’.
I’d recently read that Bodega, a diminutive town just inland from Bodega Bay, was the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s creepy, 1963 horror film, The Birds. Although no film buff, this was a film I had actually seen around 35 years ago and I vaguely remembered how unsettling it was, so insisted we have a quick, unplanned look in. There, in the silence, were the instantly-recognisable church and schoolhouse (now a private residence) standing isolated and lonely just as in the film.
Although it was daytime, with a weak sun filtering down from watery blue skies, I felt a sense of desolation. Whether it was the power of suggestion from Hitchcock’s film or something that he himself had felt when seeking out a film location, I’m not sure. All I know is that, when a crow in the tree above me began calling spookily from the silence, I abruptly decided it was time to leave.
We had planned to continue inland to the main Highway 101 at this point, but were going well against the clock, so decided to continue following the deserted coast road for a little longer before heading inland to pay our cash toll for the Golden Gate Bridge and then heading south more rapidly on the fast road.
Paying for the toll was never going to be straightforward without a car transponder nor any way to pay electronically in advance in our circumstances (we’d looked into it the last time we'd had wifi access during a short library stop in Oregon). We were stuck with paying by cash, which was no longer accepted at the Golden Gate Bridge itself. The effort, time and worry we had trying to pay the toll would make a story in itself. The most basic downfall of the system, that led to all our other problems, was that the Golden Gate Bridge website is not kept properly up to date with the list of locations for paying the cash toll.
The first place we headed to pay the toll was enormously difficult to find, had changed names, and then no longer handled toll payments. The second place wasn’t there. We found ourselves heading towards a third place just as the evening commuter traffic began to build, and then found there was nowhere to park. We finally found one metered space and darted into it, but couldn’t find how to pay by cash and had no way to pay by phone (with no SIM card and no wifi). Nor could I move the car if someone official came along as I wasn’t included on the car insurance (so as to keep the lengthy car rental charge reasonable: Dave had been the sole driver for our 2800 mile journey in the USA). The girls and I waited on tenterhooks as Dave sprinted to the toll payment place several roads away just before it closed.
Our relief and joy when Dave reappeared after 15 minutes, running, smiling and clutching a small paper receipt that declared our successful cash payment for the upcoming toll, was palpable. Now, we just had to do our fourth U-turn across several lanes of traffic and all should be fine. In celebration, I reached for our bag of sweets and offered them around. “Treat, anyone? We’ve a choice of honey and turnip bonbons, sugared diesel pastilles or Deep Heat candies?” There were no takers.
The rest of the car journey was straightforward. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge – so simply and suddenly after all the preceding palava that I almost forgot to remind myself how romantic crossing that bridge is. We passed through San Francisco with no real hold-ups and reached the airport hotel that we’d pre-booked for the night.
Of course, that wasn’t quite the end of the story. No Spice travels ever run completely smoothly. The hotel wifi was unexpectedly in the midst of a lengthy outage, so initially we couldn’t check in for our flights as planned, and then couldn’t get four seats together as a family for our 10½ hour overnight flight home, only two pairs of seats several rows apart with no aisle access. (The algorithms used by airlines to assign seats really could use some improvement.) Next morning, we had difficulty refuelling the car at the intended fuel station as it only accepted American debit cards (which we didn’t own) or cash (which we had run down ready to leave the country).
At the airport, our pre-paid hold bags didn’t show up on the United Airlines system so we had to argue our position – luckily, we had our payment receipts with us. Then no-one could help with the split seat bookings, and I was sent from pillar to post, having to approach a number of rather rude United Airlines uniformed ground staff. I wasn’t surprised they couldn’t help: their job is merely to direct the cattle.
I decided I’d be better off waiting until we boarded and sorting it myself by nicely asking if a couple of fellow travellers would consider swapping with two of our seats, for both our and their convenience (after all, which guests want parents and children continually clambering past them when a simple swap of seats will sort it). A really helpful group travelling together enabled us to swap into two pairs of seats in adjacent rows, one being an aisle seat, which improved things no end.
And, of course, the flight left late (this time, by 1 hour and 20 minutes) to maintain harmony with our previous three flights, all delayed.
Poppy settled next to me soon into the flight and strung up her little, red, drawstring bag from the tray table clip as a hammock for her cuddly toy to relax in comfort. We then snuggled together and coiled partly round each other like two slugs, and promptly fell asleep at the end of another long adventure.