Redwoods National Park, CA

We camped one night just outside of Grants Pass, OR, on our way south and west toward the California coast. Our proudly Republican camp hosts here were quite excited to host real Texans at their quaint little campground for the night ;-) I didn't have the energy to talk politics on this particular occasion.

We hit the road relatively early on Sunday morning for a very long day of driving. We would cover nearly 550 miles before we would call it a night in the California wine country.

But the drive was just scenic as it was long -- that makes such a difference. We drove hundreds of miles through a collection of California's Redwood National and State Parks.

And like Crater Lake, the size of a California Coastal Redwood is really something that's hard to fathom!

This one toppled over, hundreds, perhaps even a thousand years ago. Kim is standing beneath its root structure. The landscape looked like Ewok village on Endor!

It's not just the trees that are huge... Check out the clover, and blackberries!

I think my favorite parts of the park were the hidden back roads. We dropped the Jeep into 4x4 mode and took off down some roads that put our Tom Tom GPS into some crazy error conditions.

I had quite a bit of fun in 4-Lo crawling through a rocky river bed before we turned around and drove back through several amazing groves of Redwoods.

It's hard to explain, and hard to comprehend the height of these mammoth trees.

The Redwood Highway also touches the Pacific Coast a few dozen times. The waves are huge, and quite cold up here. We spotted a few surfers, and passed a long board competition.

This flying contraption completely befuddled us, looking like something that belonged in a RedBull Flu-Tag competition :-)

Unfortunately, we didn't really have a good map of the Redwood National Park (a couple of the ranger stations were closed this Sunday). We drove nearly to the southern tip of the park before we actually got a map.

We did spend some time on a few disused Pacific coast beaches. We thought we might have spotted a whale here, but I think it was just a big rock, exposed by the trough of large waves.

This black sand beat was quite nice.

Here we are down at sea level, on the far western side of the US -- a few thousand miles from our last beach stop, in Hilton Head, South Carolina!

The temperature was a bit cooler on the west coast, mostly due to the lack of sunshine.

We backtracked a bit to take an AWESOME road (much of it unpaved) up, over, and down the mountain ridge. We had perhaps the prettiest picnic of the trip, having an entire hillside and roadside stop entirely to ourselves. We made mac-n-cheese (of course), chicken noodle soup, and a microbrew from Bend, OR. There was one other thing remarkable about this picnic site -- there were smoldering remnants of a natural wildfire just a few feet away from our park bench. The smokey smell was actually quite aromatic, and we could even warm ourselves (it was around 45F) by some of the logs that were burning.

We finished our picnic and then winded our way through a good 50 miles of hairpin turns, mountains, trees, and Native American reservations.

We eventually worked our way back to Eureka, CA and the coast. Here, we left the park for good and started a very long haul to Petaluma, CA, catching a gorgeous sunset over the Pacific Ocean along the way.

We arrived in Petaluma around midnight on Sunday. I needed a good night's sleep for a long week of work, rolling up to the release of Ubuntu 10.10 exactly a week later. Kim would enjoy her week touring vineyards in Sonoma, Napa, and St. Helena. More about that soon...

:-Dustin