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Travels
8 months, 4 weeks ago
The final leg of my journey (yes, the past few posts have all been describing one day) involved me staying the night in Eureka, California. This was probably not the greatest decision I’ve ever made. My draw in coming here was that I’d wanted to explore the Humboldt Bay area, which I’d passed through some years before but didn’t get a chance to look around. Also, I was hoping they’d have a decent beach and I’d be able to go swimming. Alas, I didn’t arrive until the sun was almost down and decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to go out in the ocean after dark. Still, I had a decent dinner at the Lost Coast Brewery and got a chance to drive around a bit.
I’m sure there must be nice parts of Eureka somewhere, but the parts that I saw were kind of dumpy. There was an “Old Town” area with a lot of really nice Victorian houses, perhaps the ritziest and well known of which is the Carson Mansion, featured above, which is known far and wide for being so over the top with its Victorianess that other, lesser mansions weep at their own inadequacy. Overall, I wasn’t terribly impressed, though. If I had to do it all over again I would have just spent two nights in Crescent City.
I got back on the road by seven the next morning, heading north. The miraculously clear skies I’d had for the one day of my touring around and taking pictures was gone, and I had rain pouring down pretty much the entire way back home. I passed a yet another sign that over-delivered on the way back: upon seeing ‘ELK MEADOW’ I made a sharp turn, and sure enough was rewarded with a meadow, and elk:
And that’s about it. I got back on the road, stopping once for coffee in Crescent City and another time for gas in Woodburn, but other than that I drove straight home. That was my vacation: a single glorious day of sunshine and ocean and old-growth redwood trees and armies of elk, bracketed by long stretches of driving on either side. I’m not complaining. I had fun exploring the California north coast for a day.
Now I guess I’ll have to get back to writing again, instead of just posting pictures all the time. Eh.
(The photo set is all finished now, if you want to get a visual recap.)
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