As you can probably tell from my less than scintillating writing in the last post, the trip down the Oregon, though lovely and great to experience, isn’t the most exciting in terms of things happening to write about. Still, it was nice and relaxing, especially now we are back in big and busy cities and I can look back at the quiet and small towns and miss them!
Bandon to Eureka was pretty similar to the previous day, with fog dominating the seascape, and the sun only occasionally poking its head out to briefly make us think that it was going to be sunny after all! We saw some more amazing views of beaches, dunes, valleys, trees, rocks and cliffs and it was mostly an enjoyable drive on good roads.
We crossed the border from Oregon to California, and started our California leg of the trip. Though of course you couldn’t immediately tell the difference we soon started to see Redwoods along the road and the landscape was pretty soon dominated by the huge trees. Redwoods are incredible trees, and some live to 2,000 years and can withstand pretty much anything. We saw quite a few with some serious fire damage but apart from being burnt to a crisp at the bottom they seemed fine otherwise! As usual we stopped for pictures at loads of spots, but Trinidad stood out as a particularly nice bay, with great views.
We checked into the Eureka Travelodge, and set out to explore after some more trip planning. We now have the rest of our route pretty much figured out and we’ve given up even trying to stretch the trip out to the full six months – so Londoners, expect to see us towards the end of August or start of September! After we’d booked up accommodation for the next couple of weeks we set out to explore Eureka; I’d read that it is quite a large town, with an old centre and buildings dating to Victorian times. We certainly found the old town and the buildings, but that was about all! There was a lack of bars/pubs, though quite a few restaurants specialising mostly in seafood (strange that!). We eventually went into a dive bar called the Shanty and had a drink, before going to what looked like about the only option for food in our part of town, another Irish pub Gallagher’s Irish Pub. The place was quite busy and they had some live music (Irish?) that I tried to avoid as it all sounded exactly the same! I had another Patty Melt and Brian had my onion rings – the Patty Melt was really good actually and I really enjoyed it. After dinner we went back to the Shanty where they were playing some proper throwback music from my era so I insisted on staying way past a reasonable time! Also, some very random bloke started talking to us about Obama, Marijuana and pigeons on Trafalgar Square, so of course I left Brian to deal with him!
Things I learned today: Don’t talk to a random stranger wearing Obama (or any politician) on his t-shirt late in the evening if you can avoid it!
Biltong and Burger 