Apr 4-7 - Crescent City CA

Our trip began at 8:29am as we pulled away, confident we'd remembered every last detail. We pulled over for breakfast at the Umpqua Lighthouse overlook outside Reedsport, where we also called ahead to an RV park in Crescent City CA to book a three night stay. Crescent City is an interesting town - it was almost completely destroyed in March 1964 by the tsunami waves generated by the Alaskan Earthquake. The tsunami didn't do any appreciable damage anywhere else on the west coast.

After a fuel stop in Coos Bay OR, we meandered down Highway 101. Despite the forecasts, weather was good. We had a brief moment of anxiety about 2 hours into the day when we realized that neither of us had loaded the ditty bag containing Al's razor, the charger for the electric toothbrush, Judy's "pills for today" medicine holder, and some other stuff we still don't remember. This necessitated a shopping stop in Brookings, OR (last chance to not pay sales tax) for essential replacements.

Judy's Highlights

The little county museum in Crescent City was so neat - they weren't really open except for the gift shop, but somebody went around and turned on all the lights for us, and we had over an hour to check out an amazing array of coastal Indian artifacts, lots of info and pictures of the 1964 tsunami, among other things. Did you know they used to mail tooled leather post cards?! I took a picture through the display case of some of them that had been lashed together to make a mat. Check it out! I love light houses - we walked out to the Battery Point light house when the tide was low, but it wasn't open to see the inside - we'll have to go back some day.

Al's Highlights:

There's no way to overstate the incredible majesty of an old-growth redwood. Standing next to a tree that's 18 feet in diameter and 300+ feet tall makes anybody feel small. Check the picture album (below) for more.

Seeing Ice Age 2 in a theater full of kids makes the movie just that much more enjoyable. Surprised both of us.

There's no way to under-estimate the joy of paying over $150 to "fill 'e up". We're trying to average two or three days of staying someplace for each day we spend burning gasoline. We may want to lengthen our stays. :-)

Click here to see a sideshow of all our pictures from this leg of the trip.

Next stop - Vallejo CA. Roller coasters if it's not raining.

Stay tuned . . .