Over the mountains and the sea
Jun 20th, 2007 by Ashley
– Trip to North Coast, Part I
For the past memorial weekend, 6 of us took a 3-day trip to the north coast of California. It’s really hard to refer to the places we went in a general way. No Cal? We’re in No Cal right now.
Day 1 – Driving
So we took off around 7:30 which was painfully early for us… well, maybe just for Chun and me. We picked up the van at Oakland airport, loaded our backpacks and food, we’re heading north!
The first day was all about driving, hectic long driving. But we still managed to hit some fun places, mostly red woods. We took CA-101 and passed the wine country without hesitation (I know that sounds like blasphemy for some people XD), had picnic at a rest area. At that time, all food were fresh and yummy. We had rolls, grapes, apple juice, tomatoes and… yep, more rolls.
Finally we got to redwoods state park around 3 something, which was way behind our schedule, we drove through a tree and we drove on the beautiful Avenue of the Giants, passed Eureka, which didn’t seem very impressing, but Ethan and I still cracked some jokes about Eureka being a government sponsored secret science project town which… Joanne almost believed, and got to our chief destination, Redwood National Park. The tree are huge, but I didn’t get the feeling that Margarita described – acknowledging the grandness of nature and feeling like an ant. Nevertheless, I did enjoy those amazing tree holes. No matter what created the tree holes, they sure are spectacular.
And don’t forget the Fern Canyon. We had to walk across the streams, jumping from one log to another to see the… fern. Seeing these ferns reminded me of the summer camp in elementary school. I remember being taught how to tell this fern from that fern and also learned that there is some part of some kind of fern is edible, I just didn’t remember what kind. (Not that I was hungry…)
It’s getting dark, we had some food on the car and kept going north. Our destination was Klamath Falls, OR. (We’re leaving California!) We were anxious to get to our hotel and felt frustrated when the GPS told us that it’s still 3 hours away. It, again, proved that artificial intelligent cannot compare with human brain. GPS told us to take CA-62, which is at the same difficult level as CA-1. And we were driving in the dark, which made it even more creepy. On CA-62, there was a man waving his cell phone at us, it was so like horror movie so we didn’t stop. (We comforted ourselves that there was another car behind us that he could still get help.) It’s curious that why a men (some said he’s a 20 something young man, some said he’s a middle-aged man…. go figure!) would be doing up there in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of the night. Movie fragments like Hostel, Vacancy and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were running in our minds (not that I’ve ever watched any of them), we sighed our long held breath when we reached back to the civilization, WalMart, Safeway, Applebees… I almost bursted out into tears.
