Cape Mendocino or where not to go in cali.....

Got up not knowing where we were going today. Heard about a little town down south called Ferndale so thought we would go down there and take a look at the Victorian houses. Found one that was really cool and a bunch that were combinations of both Victorians and Craftsman homes. This is the one that we liked.....

There were a couple others that the paint scheme on could have been changed and they would have been great runner's up.....

The downtown area was pretty cool too with the building architecture.

Worth riding down to see it, but then we decided that we should go out and see Cape Mendocino. The Cape itself was beautiful......... but getting there was a whole 'nuther thang...... You see, you take Mattole road about 24 miles out from Ferndale to get there, on a little bitty two lane road.... that was last paved in 1930 or so...... Two vehicles of recent vintage do good to pass on this road without becoming one with each other...... About the best you make speed wise was 25 or so..... and northern Californa has mountains too. They are on the way out to the Cape and on the way away from it too.......

Once we got within about 10 miles of the coast, we found this view....
You can tell how close you are to the coast by the fog...... I like it here, but the fog is starting to get a bit old........

We did find the beach though. Almost a black sand beach.....

Unlike Washington and Oregon, the beach front in California is not public property. We drove past several miles of fenced beachfront that had cattle in it to get to this spot. Bummer...

Another 25+ miles down the road from here, we found ourselves in the Humbolt Redwoods State Park...... another awesome drive through the giants!




It was getting pretty late in the afternoon when we popped out of the redwoods. We decided that we'd stop in Arcata to check out their bait shop for dinner. Arcata is a smallish town that houses Humbolt State University. It is chock full of weirdness...... A whole bunch of homeless folks, sidewalk musicians, white rasta's with their dredlocks, green hair, purple hair, blue hair on someone not 80, etc........

I'm sure it will get weirder though.

Tomo, the bait shop was pretty damn good though. I had an oyster shooter simmered in their special ginger sauce with a shot of Ku Gold Agave on the side. The shooter was excellant, especially since getting oyster that have not been fried out here is hard to do. Oysters here are dipped in gold too, apparently. Saw a dozen on the menu yesterday for $22.00........ No really, 22 bucks.......

Now the Ku Gold Agave....... man that stuff is good. It's Korean too, not Mexican south of the border. If you get a chance, try it....... if you get a chance to try it with an oyster shooter, do it.
The sushi at Tomo was good, at least the fish was. They were a little big on the rice balls and the rolls where cut too big, the fish was swimming in the Pacific this morning. It don't get much fresher than this....

And since we are talking about food, we started the morning letting Forrest the wonder dog walk on the Trinidad State beach. There is a resturant on the docks here that we had breakfast at. This port has commercial fishing boats in it also. I asked about the commercial fishing. They do the dungeness crab thing starting in December and that's their big commercial fishing gig here. They have not been able to do commercial Salmon fishing here for years, and they did not even get to do a sport season this year. What I found interesting is that they have a viable bottom fishing commercial industry here. Hook and line for snapper, rockfish, halibut, lingcod, for the resturants. That would be a great job, eh? :-)

So, tomorrow's moving day again. We are heading down to Fort Bragg for a couple nights then on to Petaluma KOA just north of San Francisco. Not sure how long we'll stay in Petaluma yet. Depends on how interesting we find San Fran and how long it takes us to see the sights.

Bed time... night ya'll...