Today started early in Phillipsville with coffee on the porch. It’s gotten quite cold up here. In short order, we packed up and headed out up the Avenue of the Giants, which is a scenic alternate of US 101. Today was our “do silly tourist stuff” day.
We drove our cars through a tree. Twice for extra pictures.
We walked through a short nature loop trail, where the US Forest Service provided a guidebook so George could read it to us.
We stood inside hollowed out trunks of trees.
We took more selfies. (Which I’d like to believe are less detestable since I’m using a real camera and a lens which carries its own insurance policy, someone back me up here…)
We took family portraits on the beach.
Then we went to the TREES OF MYSTERY! A very boxed and bubble-wrapped nature trail whose definition of “difficult hike” was anything with stairs. The loop trail ended straight into a giftshop. In honesty, though, the trees there were truly impressive. It was a stunningly beautiful forest, despite the crowds. I could easily have spent more time there.
Each formation was spectacular, and they provided a little historical perspective to demonstrate the age of these trees.
(It may be hard to see in this image. The following rings are noted, starting from the left: Crusades 1096, Magna Carta 1215, Columbus sails to America 1492, Pilgrims land at Plymouth 1620, Declaration of Independence signed 1776, California joins the Union 1850.)
We rode a gondola to an observation point at the top of the park which looked out into the forest canopy on one side and the beach on the other.
From there, it was a short segment up to US 101 into Oregon. So naturally, on this, our cheesy tourist day, we stopped to take pictures at the border, too.
I should point out that while the border into Oregon was just a road, but the side that went into California had a vehicle inspection checkpoint. With expired tags, I can never go back.
Into Oregon, we stopped for a beautiful sunset and dinner at Redfish before driving on to our bayhouse at the edge of Coos Bay. All we really wanted was simple, and this just happened to be on the side of the road when we got hungry, we didn’t realize how nice it was, but it was definitely worth it.
It’s almost a shame that today’s drive came after Big Sur and the Sausalito-Legett segment of Highway 1 because, by comparison, this was less thrilling. A lot of it felt more like rural freeway driving. But the scenery was still gorgeous.
The cars performed quite admirably today! No misbehaviors or amusing hijinks today. Even my exhaust issue seems to have mended itself mostly, or at least become less pronounced. These horses seem to be settling into the ride and just as excited about it as we are.
We also took two selfies today because hashtag-tourist-things.