Day Fiftyfour - Aug 5, 2004

Half Moon Bay, CA to Humboldt Redwood SP, CA

High Point: Brian - Camping in the Avenue of the Giants Theresa - It's all good

Low Point: Brian - Working around a festival at the end of a long day Theresa - Taking sooo many pictures the camera's battery eventually gave up

Miles By Automobile: 295

Miles Total: 13386

Price Per Gallon: 2.23

Today's Weather: Overcast and windy, in the high 60's

Tonight's Lodging: Hidden Springs Campground

Where Uploaded: Crescent City, CA

Wildlife: Cows, various sea birds, a seal

Daily Didactic

The day started amusingly out of class in the Pelican Point RV Park. While we had intended to go to sleep in a slightly slummish public beach campground, we woke up in a "big rig" park with plenty of funny looks.

We hit the road for the 30 miles north to San Francisco. If your goal is to circumvent San Francisco (we have been here before), this is the cleanest route. Following the western edge of the continent, through Daly City, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and west out of Mill City is the quickest Highway 1 "San Francisco Bypass". Don't get us wrong, we love San Francisco, just not today. The road from Mill City to Stinson Beach is a wonderfully dramatic curvy stretch that Hitchcock used in Birds and North By Northwest. It also returned us to Highway 1 for the day.

Highway 1 north of San Francisco is less exhilerating and more often travels along cliffside meadows and pastures. It may actually be more generically scenic than it's southern cousin. It goes through far more dipping and rolling roads and amusingly picturesque towns. We bobbed, weaved, rolled and wound for hours with more "that's pretty"'s per mile than much of the trip. Eventually the path heads inland from Westport toward the redwood town of Legget. We had decided to look for a small campground just north of Legget, in the southern end of the redwood forest. In perhaps one of the more ironic turns of the road trip we descended toward Richardson Grove State Park and into an intensifying traffic snarl of hippy porportions. Long story short, and a testament to our agedness, we were the only Volkswagen bus of many trying to get around the "Reggae On The River" festival. We did get a lot of friendly smiles.

We punted and, through a happy accident, found one of a few rapidly disappearing sites (due to the Reggae On The River "situation") in the Hidden Springs Campground twenty miles north in the middle of the most awesome Avenue Of The Giants scenic byway. Far closer to enormous redwoods than we had thought likely, we called it a night.