Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Jun 2012: Day 19 – Garberville to Grants Pass

By Nige on June 22, 2012 at 10:00 pm
Type: Post
Story: Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Jun 2012 Category: Travel
Tags: Avenue of the Giants | Best Western | Crescent City | Eureka | Garberville | Grants Pass | Holiday Inn Express | Starbucks

Right so today has been not nice.  It’s rained all day (for the first time), and we are not thinking very positively about the rest of the trip, primarily because of the weather.  We need sun and heat, not clouds and rain.

We started off early since it was going to be a long drive.  Breakfast is never much to shout about at a Best Western and this was no different.

The Avenue of the Giants was the first thing we came too and we decided to take this 20 mile diversion.  Took a few photos and the nice thing was that it was dry and there was no one else on the road at this point.

We reached Fortuna and found the local Starbucks for a brief stop to top up on caffeine (thanks Ann).

We got back onto the coast near Eureka and we had an amazing idea…  See separate post about the change request.  At this point the rain was coming down fairly consistently.

The next significant point was reaching Crescent City which I wanted to stop over at, but Mrs B wouldn’t even entertain that idea.  We had a quick look at the hotel we stopped at 6 years ago (no longer a Hilton) but still looks nice.  We had thoughts of having lunch at a lovely restaurant we had stumbled upon last time, but it was closed for the season(!), so we stopped off at a big diner in the city instead.  It was nice to be inside out of the rain, and the poor old Mustang wasn’t happy being left outside, so we took a picture of it looking miserable…

The last leg of the drive was an 80 mile stretch inland to Grants Pass, which didn’t take that long, and it was good to arrive at our destination.

The Holiday Inn Express at Grants Pass was ok, and we decided to pop out to Applebee’s for dinner which was really good value and tasty.  Spent the evening implementing the CR approved earlier, cancelling hotels, booking new hotels, planning out routes etc.  Felt good that a revised plan was coming together.

Stats for Day 19: 240 miles, 2 Starbucks coffees, 0 Hollywood celebs spotted, 0 Subway inches consumed, about even on the calories.

(Revised) plan for tomorrow is to drive up to Crater Lake, which we are both really looking forward to.

Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Jun 2012