Here it goes:
1. Salem
On our way back from the Olympics we made a pit-stop in Salem Oregon to visit Simon's relatives once again. We initially planned on staying just a few days, but after taking our van for an oil change, we found out that the rear brakes were a mess and stayed for more than a week (almost two?). After deliberating for days, we decided to get them fixed. Many $$s later, we were on the road.
Despite our van troubles, we did have a great time in Salem. We caught up on Olympic action, sleep and showers. We went for an awesome hike called the "Cascade Head Trail." It was a marvelously nice day. Actually, the weather while we were in Salem was mostly amazing. Sunny sun shine for 4 or 5 days in a row with temperatures reaching in the 60s. Beautiful!
2. Dunes
After Salem, we headed down the Oregon Coast to the Umpqua Sand Dunes for a days exploration. They were incredible! They are the longest coastal sand dunes in the U.S. Just amazing! Though it was a rainy day, we had an absolute blast!
3.Crescent City
On our way from the Dunes to the Redwoods, we stopped in a decent size town called Crescent City, located in Northern California along the coast. We decided to sleep there for the night and head for hiking in the morning. We ran into a few interesting folks along the way. One guy was super excited about our bumper stickers and said he had never seen as good a collection as ours. In fact he had only seen 30% of our stickers. After telling us to "keep it political as hell," he preceded to take pictures of the back of our van.
That night we decided to park in a small lot right on the ocean. I was worried about parking there because a sign clearly read "No overnight parking." Simon, intent on hearing the lulling ocean waves as we fell asleep, didn't seem concerned and we ended up staying. Well, that is until around 2:30am when I awoke to an extremely bright light in my face. I soon realized that it was a police car with its spot only a foot or two from my face. I instantly realized we had some xplanin' to do, but before we could think of our escape from a ticket plan, he sped off. We decided it was best to leave that area and find new parking. About 10 minutes later as we started to drive, we watched a tow-truck and a K-9 unit headed the same way we came. Now, I shouldn't assume this hullabaloo was for us, but there appeared to be nothing else happening within that area. Pfew....
The following morning we woke up and decided to head to the Crescent City information center to find out about Redwoods hiking. We asked the ranger if she could recommend any overnight, backpacking hikes. She told us that she could, but a lot of the beach access hikes would be closed. We wondered why and she said because of the tsunami warnings. Of course, being that we are pretty out of touch with society at the moment, we had no idea an 8.8 magnitude earthquake shook Chile that morning. It's funny, because I kept joking with Simon that I hated parking by the ocean at night because "what if a tsunami came?" He said we had a better chance of winning the lottery. I'm going to go play my numbers now....
We actually tried to watch the tsunami make it's arrival along the coast from a vista point, but we either missed it (it was traveling at 600mph!) or it was pathetically small :( Too bad, we waited all afternoon.
4.Redwoods!
Wow! My neck hurts just thinking about these trees. We hiked 8 miles in old growth at Prairie Creek State Park and viewed amazingly tall trees all along the way. I will admit, we both expected some of the trees to be much wider, but the height!! Don't get me wrong, many trees were extremely wide, but probably very few reach the 6 foot diameter that you read about.
5. On our way!
We're still traveling down the coast. (gees this state is big!) We took highway 1 the other day, just for the heck of it and were quite surprised by its remoteness. Some sections were some of the curviest roads I've ever driven.
Simon has been working like mad the last couple days and I've been hanging out. Yesterday we were in Fort Bragg and today we are in Santa Rosa. We are less than an hour from San Francisco and plan on hanging out there for a few days.
So all in all, things are good. We are becoming more and more settled in the van and learning the rules of the road.
Until then...
