Holiday to the Pacific West Coast in Aug 2006: Day 7 – Crescent City to Garberville

Woke at 3am and 5:30am again this morning.  Vick managed to sleep through to nearly 7am.  The weather in Crescent City reflected our view of the city itself – dull and overcast.  The mist was still hanging around.

We left at around 8:30am and got back on the 101 and continued south.

Most of the first couple of hours was spent winding up and down hills in the mist, so we didn’t see much and there was certainly not much to take photos of! 

We reached Eureka fairly early and stopped for a coffee (another independent (Ramone’s), good coffee and buns but dreadful loo).

Well on the map it looks like a 5 mile diversion off the main route, but the road was really windy and poor quality so progress was slow. But the road ran alongside the Lost Coast for a while, which was beautiful and quite isolated. 

In the end (40 miles and 90 minutes later) we reached the State Park which was a wonderful sight to behold.  Huge redwoods on either side of a narrow road winding in and out of these trees. 

By this time we had progressed far enough south to leave a lot of the mist behind us, and what was left had been burnt off by the sun, so the remainder of the day was very warm and sunny.

We briefly visited the Redwood National Park Visitors Centre and this inspired us to seek out a trail in one of the parks down the 101.  We decided to go through Ferndale and follow the Lost Coast and wind our way back through The Redwood State Park.

We had bought made-to-order sandwiches at the Safeway store in Eureka, where the staff were very friendly and the sandwiches were excellent. We ate our lunch in the shade of the redwood trees in one of the most stunning places in the world.

We stopped off at a parking area with 3 trails – Tall Tree, Giant Tree and Flat Iron Tree.  Naturally for the Americans these 3 trails were not further than about 400 yards long, and took us to something specific to look at. Mind you, looking for a ‘Tall Tree’ is a bit ironic when you are surrounded by trees at least 15 storeys high.

Next stop was the Avenue of Giants, which is a long road which follows the 101 but is a more leisurely journey through more redwoods. 

Along this route we stumbled across the Redwood drive thru.  Basically a very large redwood with a hole in it, and some entrepreneur decided that it would make a very attractive business to encourage tourists to pay $1.50 per person to drive through it. 

As typical tourists we had to get our picture of us going through – it was a bit of a tight squeeze!.

Anyway we finally reached Garberville at around 4:30pm and chilled out.  We had a great meal at Cecil’s which served some amazing steak and pork chops in a Louisiana style.

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Aug 2006