We have been here in the fog, but even so, the town of Eureka seems rather drab. There are a lot of interesting people walking around, people who look like they have been in the same mode since the 60’s. Last night we decided to take an evening tour of the local co-op. North Coast Co-op has a huge mural on the street side facade, and is bigger than most major grocery stores. I love natural food stores, and while it wasn’t Trader Joe’s, it was bigger than some and filled with amazing stuff. Mo is at a loss in this environment, so I walked around explaining some of the lingo to her and some of the reasons for buying this or that instead of the everyday brands you get in a regular grocery store.
The produce was fantastic, and if our refrigerator wasn’t full I would have hauled tons of colorful stuff home. We can’t eat enough to support all the temptations so gorgeously displayed. We managed to get out of the store with some great looking green tea from China and two bottles of “Our Daily Red”, an organic red table wine with no sulfites. Keeps the migraines away for me. I love a good red wine, but will certainly settle for a daily red glass of this good stuff full of antioxidants and other good things. It was a fun way to spend a dark rainy evening in Eureka.
Today we are going to try out the Samoa Cookhouse, the last surviving lumber camp style cookhouse in the west, built in 1893. The meals are all served family style and breakfast today will be French toast, sausage, and who knows what else. There is a lumberjack museum with the cookhouse that should be entertaining. Another treat will be breakfast company, with some soil scientist friends of mine located at the Arcata Soil Survey Office who have agreed to meet us there this morning. Looking forward to it.
Our breakfast was wonderful, and visiting with Sue Azman made it even more so. I’m not sure if Mo enjoyed all the soil survey talk as much as I did, but we all had a good time talking about kayaking the coast. Sue is an avid sea kayaker and we had fun talking kayaks and possible trips. Back to camp in plenty of time to button up and we actually left the park at 12:01. Gas in Eureka was a whopping 3.35 per gallon, and we knew that in Fort Bragg it was only 2.99, so we only put 50 bucks in the MoHo to get us on down the road. Again, our travel day was a short 130 miles or so. BUT! What a trip it was!!
We traveled south on 101 for some distance before turning off on the alternate highway that travels 32 miles through the redwoods, called the Avenue of the Giants. It was a leisurely, meandering drive through huge trees and narrow roads, but with no traffic at all. Stopping at several of the auto tour sites for photos, and some short walks in the forest was refreshing. Once more, Abby wasn’t welcome on the trails, even on a leash, so Mo stayed in the MoHo so I could walk through the forest a bit and take pictures.
I had been enjoying the subtle light on a pale yellow vine that seemed to be in many of the trees and wanted to photograph it. Closer inspection revealed the bane of my California soil survey life, poison oak! It was creeping at least 40 feet high into the trees, and covering the forest floor, mixed with the ferns and oxalis. Poison oak is ubiquitous in the Mother Lode where I worked, but I had no idea it was so prevalent in this high precipitation redwood forest. Ugh! I am extremely allergic and had to do a couple of hospital visits while working in California. It was one of the main reasons I was so glad to finally retire and get back home to Oregon.
At the terminus of the Avenue of the Giants, it wasn’t far to our turn west from 101 to Fort Bragg. Although Highway 1 is famous as one of the most beautiful scenic byways in the country, this part of “one” crossed the last of the coastal ranges via an incredibly curvy and steep road before arriving at the ocean cliffs a few miles north of Fort Bragg. I think this may have been the curviest road we have driven in the MoHo, and I’m glad Mo was the one doing the driving.
Jeremy wasn’t too happy about the curves either, and he insisted on riding on the dash board, twisting and turning and trying to get comfortable. I tend to get car sick when it’s bad like this, but on this trip I remembered to bring my “sea bands”, wrist bands with knobs that create pressure on meridian points on the wrist. I was starting to get queasy when I put them on, and was afraid they wouldn’t work, but they did! Amazing little tool, these wrist bands. On the way down the hill we saw a flare and then a rolled over car with several people trying to turn it back upright. It all seemed a bit strange because there must have been eight people there and only 2 cars, the rollover and another car. Hmmm. Which car had that many people in it? They all looked a bit sheepish, and a bit strange. We didn’t stop.
At the bottom of the hill, a pickup in front of us pulled over and a poor girl jumped out and got sick right there. I realized then that I wasn’t sick at all! Not a bit. Thank you wrist bands! The last few miles of the route followed curving cliffs along the Pacific. The fog had lifted, and the clouds were heavy but not raining. On the horizon of the ocean, the light caught in a brilliant band among all the grays of sky and water.
We arrived at the Pomo RV Park and Campground around 4:30, and settled in to our very private, very quiet spot at the upper end of the campground. Here again we have good TV, good Wi-Fi, and power and water. All this excitement for a whopping 40. per night! No discounts here except Good Sam, which we don’t have.
This park is also on the Camp Club USA list, but there are so many restrictions that we probably won’t manage a visit here when we could get a discount. Camping sites on this part of the coast are few and far between, and most consist of a parking lot surrounded by ugly stuff. Even the state parks are all 35 per night and don’t have the amenities. Tomorrow we will drive around a bit and see what is here. The prediction is for hard rain tonight and tomorrow but sun on Monday. Perfect! We can check everything out and plan for another kayak adventure Monday morning. Again, we are staying 3 nights. First night to settle in, then two days to explore before we move on to the next horizon.
Early this morning we woke to see the park lights muted by fog. As the light came slowly, the fog didn’t lift at all. Kayaking anywhere around Humboldt Bay requires working with the tides, and high tide was coming in today around 11am. If we were to get out on the water and back without getting stranded on a mudflat, we needed to be out by 10 at the latest. At ten, the fog was a thick as ever. I know we could have gone anyway, but somehow boating unknown waters when you can’t see anything anyway isn’t very enticing. On to Plan B.
In another specialty shop, the owner spent some time laughing with us about how hard it is to decorate a very tall tree when you are very short, and then proceeded to give us the history of the store. Almost every single shopkeeper asked us from where we hailed. It was leisurely and fun and I only spent a small amount on a bottle of yummy orange blossom hand lotion. 
The trip out to the beach meanders along a small road that passes dairies and farmhouses, even a very old abandoned Victorian is total disrepair, a perfect haunted house. 
The beach was open and empty, no other cars or people in sight, and the wind wasn’t blowing terribly hard, just a nice ocean breeze. The sun lifted a bit and we got in a great beach walk, which Abby loved as well. Back to the car, the narrow road led up the hill into nowhere, so of course we had to go check it out. 
On the GPS I could see we were near the ocean, but the little car icon was cruising through no man’s land, no road supposedly there at all. Google Maps on the phone could see some semblance of road, but of course reception was spotty or non existent. 
We topped off the afternoon with a side trip to the Loleta Cheese Factory. (this wonderful shop was closed in December 2019 due to bankruptcy). In Oregon, Tillamook cheese is quite famous, and they have tours of the factory and cheese tasting. Oregon also has Bandon cheese, in my opinion, even better than Tillamook. The Loleta Cheese Factory was a real treat, different in that much more of the cheese making process here is by hand. It is a small, family run business that produces medal winning cheeses and 34 varieties made in small batches using traditional recipes to maintain the old flavors. I didn’t know until today that the kind of cheese depends on the culture added when the cheese is first made. 
Today was the day! We did a bit of internet searching last night to check local tides and possible put-in sites for a trip on an inland lake north of Crescent City. On Google Maps, the two lakes looked accessible but sometimes it’s hard to find a launch site where there is a lot of private land surrounding the lake or where there are wildlife refuges. Lake Talawa and Lake Earl have both. 
Another possible deterrent could be that the lake was too low and too muddy to launch there. Instead, we found tules and sedges, with ground underfoot that was firm enough to support not only us, but the Tracker. We parked just feet from the water and launched effortlessly.
I it was still quite foggy, with only filtered sun coming through so the landscape all around us looked surreal. I knew the lake shape from the phone and could see where we were on the lake, but the distances and the changes in water levels made for some interesting moments. Accompanying our paddle was the incredible sound of huge crashing surf just beyond the dunes. With the fog it was hard to discern just where we were, and thinking we were at the dunes I checked on the iPhone to find we were still in the middle of the lake with some islands that didn’t show up on Google Earth. 
Once back to the car, we loaded up effortlessly, excited about how easy our maiden voyage was. We decided to go back toward Crescent City and explore the other side of the lakes toward the ocean along Pebble Beach Road. Once we got there, we could see a lot of viewing activity along the headlands, with cars parked and people hiking out to high places and watching the surf. Once we did the same we discovered why. The waves were HUGE. It is impossible to take any kind of photos that actually show the scale of these waves coming into the shore. There are headlands and sea stacks in this vicinity that are at least 100 feet high and the waves were breaking completely over them. The waves were at least 30 feet tall, and breaking very far out from shore. There were all kinds of warnings out about staying away from the breakwater and not turning your back on the ocean, se we paid attention to all that and stayed up high. 
It was truly exciting. The power of the ocean is so huge, and sometimes with just normal waves it is easy to forget how she can be in a storm. The part that was even more amazing is that there was no storm going on here at all, in fact there wasn’t even any wind. What an exciting thing to see. Mo lived on the ocean near Half Moon Bay for more than 30 years and I spent a considerable amount of time at the ocean as well. Neither of us have ever seen waves like those we saw today.
I
The driver was tremendously accommodating and agreed to meet us in Medford by changing his route to I-5 instead of Highway 97 through Klamath Falls. It was perfect timing for us. We arrived in Medford to find him waiting patiently at the Pilot station, having arrived at 6AM!. He delivers high end boats all over the country, and his rig was loaded up with 60 foot racing rowers and some kayaks made in China and Peru. Our kayaks were bundled up in bubble wrap and plastic, and after many thank you’s and hand shaking, we transferred them to the baby car top rack, tied them down, and headed west. 
We continued our route north on I-5, grateful that we didn’t have to stay on that busy highway, and turned west at Grants Pass. One thing about living in this part of Oregon is that there are just a few ways to the coast, and none of them really is a direct route. Highway 199, west and south of Grants Pass meanders though the beautiful Illinois Valley, through Cave Junction and then along the magnificent Smith River to the coast. Mo had a condo in Brookings for several years and we were used to driving this road, but I forgot how beautiful it can be. The fall colors were magnificent with brilliant yellow and gold big leaf maples lighting up the dark green forest. Here and there are some red trees, but most of the native trees are shades of brilliant yellow. It isn’t east coast, of course, but it is still breathtaking. We took turns driving so we each could enjoy the views. Once we reached the Smith River the road narrows and follows the high gorge of the river. “Road Narrows” is a big joke to us. It’s a repeated refrain along this part of the coast. On a very narrow winding road, that is already quite narrow, appear signs that say “Road Narrows”. We are never quite sure how a paved major highway with two lanes can get more narrow!
The distance from home to our first park was a measly 146 miles. After our usual 300 mile plus days last trip, it felt as though we arrived almost too quickly. We are staying at the Hiouchi RV Resort (now called 
We arrived before 2 in the afternoon, and settled in to our site, made some snacks and opened a bottle of wine before taking the kayaks down and unwrapping them. It was an exciting moment, marred just a little bit by a couple of flaws in my boat that I didn’t expect. I immediately emailed the owner of Swift Kayak in Gravenhurst. I have no idea what the result will be. Hopefully the rim that is cracked slightly can be replaced, and he will let me know how to go about it. 
Once the boats were again loaded up on top of the Tracker, we headed in to Crescent City to find an old restaurant on the Citizen Dock where Mo had dinner with her brother and his wife. She remembered it being at the end of a pier with lots of barking sea lions to accompany a decent fish supper. We drove all around the harbor, but the restaurant never appeared. It turned out to be a good thing, though, because the place where we had dinner was fabulous. The Northwest Inn is next to a motel and is a place we would have never stopped if we hadn’t read a little blurb in the RV Park map about the fabulous fish served there.