We are at Sounds of the Sea RV Park, in Trinidad, California. I’m sitting at my
desk watching waves crash over some rocks just off shore. I can hear the ocean
and the occasional seal. This is my view:
It’s hard to tell from the photo, but you can see the ocean through the trees. We
are so lucky to be able to do this.
As many of you know by now, my posts hadn’t been automatically emailed to
people since the middle of March. I tweaked something and all of those posts
seemed to have been mailed yesterday. Which made me notice that I didn’t get
the old Easter family picture in, just two copies of the latest one. So here’s the
family Easter picture from 1992:
And to make it easy for comparison, here is this years:
It’s a good looking crew!
We left New Bern on Tuesday after helping Dad sort through Mom’s things. My
nieces got to pick out things that meant something to them and we sent a bunch
of stuff to Goodwill. She had some nice clothes, including some things she had
made. Someone will be glad to get it.
We flew back through Charlotte, NC and Phoenix, AZ. I was glad to see the
mountains in Phoenix, but I realized it was partly because I had spent most of the
previous week inside. But landing in San Jose and getting into the truck almost
felt like getting home. Even more so when we got to the trailer.
We had been parked at Morgan Hill for over a month, although we were gone for
most of it. But we knew where the grocery and hardware stores were and how to
avoid some of the traffic around town. We also got to see Wes and help him a bit
with his project and he helped Steve with one of his. San Jose has this tech
place where Wes has a membership that has all sorts of tools available. And
while they have the “normal” tools, (hammers, screwdrivers, etc.) they also have
table saws, band saws, sewing machines, sergers, quilting machines, 3d
printers, vacuum molding machines, sand blasting rooms, auto repair shop, just
about anything you can think of. You buy a membership and have to pass
training on the equipment you want to use and then you get to create! It is so
cool! Wes took us on a tour and then he and Steve went back in the afternoon to
work on a few things while I hung out with Obi.
But it was finally time to pack up and head north. We would have loved to have
spent more time on Highway 1 along the coast north of San Francisco, but it’s
not trailer friendly and we had lost some time. So we’ll catch that part of the
coast on another trip.
I think the main north-south highway in California is I5, in the middle of the state.
We chose US 101, which parallels Highway 1, and eventually becomes the
coastal highway. This apparently is not a common choice for RVs and semi’s, as
we saw very few and most of the RVs we saw were rentals (i.e., other novices).
But the traffic was ok, even through the metropolitan area and thinned out more
as we headed north.
The farther north we got, the more trees we saw. But even though there was still
a lot of grassland, there were almost no cows. We saw more cows around San
Jose than north of the bay.
By the time we got to our Thursday night’s stop, we were in a lovely wooded
valley that seems to be quite a vacation spot. We stayed at a KOA in Willit, CA,
that would be perfect for a family with kids.
Friday, we headed north again. At this point, Highway 101 is known as the
Redwood Highway and actually cuts through some redwood groves.
It’s pretty awesome to drive through these groves. As you can see, we weren’t
encountering a lot of traffic.
Highway 101 goes from 2 lane to 4 lane to divided freeway and back along this
part of the state, sometimes without discernable reason. There are lots of small
towns, but also lots of seemingly uninhabited space.
As we approached Eureka, CA, Highway 1 joins US 101 on the coast and we are
again driving by the ocean. We head for Trinidad, CA and Patrick’s Point State
Park. Our RV park is very close to the state park and also Redwood National
Park. I’m not sure which we’ll explore tomorrow.
Deb
