9/15/2017 - Heading Inland

Friday - Our active day yesterday had the leftover effect of leaving us very tired today.  And achy.  Legs and backs are stiff.  But we had to vacate our campsite so we headed out across Hwy 20.  We were on the road about 9:45, 50 degrees when I got up.  We drove Hwy 20 across the mountain range -- it was barely better than driving Hwy 1 a few days earlier.  It too was curvy, mountainous,, but the curves were not quite as sharp.  Another 20 mph drive.  It took over an hour to make it the 33 miles to Willits, which is the home of racehorse Sea Biscuit, and where he is buried.  But we didn't see that ranch, and we had not really planned on stopping.  (our road is the orange line)

We stopped at a truck stop about noon at Upper Lake, walked around a little, had some lunch, took a little break there.  Then we continued on our way east.  We drove past pretty Clear Lake for miles, a scenic drive through there, but most of it was only 45 mph because there are little communities all along this side of the lake.

 Then we finally started getting into flat land and the agriculture area.  Lots of grapes grown in this area, and we saw some olive trees and other nut trees but we didn't know what kind.  We saw fields of sunflowers that looked past their prime.  Don't know when or how they harvest the seeds but they looked ready to us.  Fields of tomatoes, not staked, which is unusual.  Maybe some potatoes, some hay.

At our noon stop, we started working on a place to stay tonight.  We are heading to the Camping World store just outside of Sacrament in Rocklin, and Joe found a campground in Loomis which looked pretty close.  Of course, no one answered the phone, so the second time he tried, he left a message.  Back on the road, I called an hour later and got "Tammy."  She thought she might have one spot but the guy had not vacated it yet so she was going to check into that.  She worked with us the rest of the afternoon, finally told us to call back about 4:00.  We came into Yuba City about 3:00 so we pulled into a Walmart parking lot, which unfortunately was posted No Overnight Parking (or we would have just stayed there), and laid down for a few minutes, then Tammy called back and said she had a cancellation so she could put us in a different spot.  She really worked hard to accommodate us.  We got there at 5:00, got hooked up, and were in for the night.

The Camping World store happens to be at the same exit, so we got lucky there.  We talked about driving over there after we gotset up but we really were too tired for shopping, and then Joe checked and found out they closed at 6:00, so that will be tomorrow's agenda. 

We are in this campground for 5 nights, so we have some time to explore Sacramento before we head to Grass Valley on Wednesday for the  horse show next weekend (starts Thursday).  And Joe will probably do some maintenance here.  He wants an haust pipe for the generator so when we are dry-camped at the horse show, our exhaust fumes won't fog out our neighbors when we have to use the generator.  Something we have probably needed for years.  But that's why we are going to Camping World.

Our weather is supposed to be in the 80s here, and there is a swimming pool at this campground, so we might take advantage of that.  The problem with California is -- when you are at the beach, it is too cold to get wet, and when you are inland in hot weather, you don't have the beach.  Since we didn't bring our wetsuits, we never went out into the Pacific beyond getting our feet wet (except for some sneaker waves that got Joe).  But we are done with the beach, and on to different things now.  And moving toward home. Slowly.

9/14/2017 - My Birthday

Thursday - Well, today is my big day -- my 70th birthday!  Yikes, does that ever sound OLD.  But Joe took good care of me today, and we celebrated in our own way.  We started out with a nice breakfast in town, then drove back to our little beach by the campground (we think it is Caspar Beach) and picked up sea glass for about 1 1/2 hour.  That is really hard on our backs, but it was fun, and we got a good amount.

We went back to the RV to clean up a little, then headed out again, this time to the real Sea Glass Beach.  As we were driving out of the campground, we saw a guy at the fish cleaning station.  He had on a wet suit, and we could see he had abalone, so we stopped and talked to him.  He had 3 abalone, his limit.  You can't scuba dive for them, you just have to free dive.  He was cleaning the third one.  We've seen the shells (decorated) at lots of places but this was the first time we had seen the actual "animal."  Abalone are very large sea snails, in the molluscs family.  He trims the meat, then deep fries it.  Yuk.

This is the top shell.  The inside is beautiful.

 This green-handled "knife" is used to pry the abalone off the rocks they cling to.

Here is the finished product, once it is trimmed out.

Once we had this lesson, we headed on to the Sea Glass Beach.  The reason there is so much sea glass here is because between 1906 and 1967, the people in Fort Bragg dumped their trash in the ocean here (which was a common practice for centuries).  Although the coastal dumps (3 of them in Fort Bragg) were cleaned up, the ocean responded by washing up beautiful multicolored pieces of the wave-tumbled glass from those dumps.

There was a short trail down to this beach, and sure enough, there was lots of sea glass.  It was several inches deep, but most of the pieces were really small, smaller than we had been finding back at Caspar Beach.  And we had been told that we couldn't take any, so we waded through the glass, and we did pick up a few pieces.  But it didn't look like the photo we had seen in a magazine.

We came upon this lady writing "happy birthday" with the white seaglass pebbles.  I said, "that must be for me."  It actually was for her son, Brandon, back in Canada.  We walked on to another rock outcropping and picked up a few more pieces.

When we came back, I went over to check on her work.  She had finished, and I said we should put "wilma" on it, so she changed Brandon to Wilma. And she thought we should add "70."  We helped her husband supply her with the glass.  Notice the little heart on the right in the reddish glass.

We had a good laugh with them.  Then they took a picture of both of us.  We found out they are camped at the same campground we are. I think I will print this photo and put it in a frame as a memento of my 70th birthday

We left here, Joe took me to lunch (Taco Bell, not too many choices here), then we drove down to the Fort Bragg Harbor.

Our next stop (my pick, since it is my birthday) was the Sea Glass Museum.  We had been told this was a good museum and gift shop, they showed samples of some of the sea glass we were finding and described its origin (perfume bottles, dishes, etc.)  And it was a nice museum.  We have actually picked up some of the shards on display.

We have 3-4 pieces of this blue and white pottery.  She told us these were rare finds.

And Joe found one like this next big piece, but I think it is a different color.

There were postcards, gift cards and puzzles showing a beach much more rich with the sea glass than the one we had been to.  Joe asked about that.  She told us there was another sea glass beach just down to the left of where we were, not very well marked, and that beach did look like the postcards.   We were pretty tired but back to Sea Glass Beach we went.  We found the trail, had to cross a cable at the viewpoint, and then practically slide down the trail, but we did find the right beach. Joe was really into this -- I was ready to quit before he was

The lady at the Museum told us that we could, in fact, pick up the sea glass.  She said the locals try to discourage it, but it wasn't against the law.  So we did.  However, it was posted that it was illegal to collect it, so we don't know.   

There was so much, several inches deep, all over this beach.  We finally just sat down and started filling our gallon zip lock bags.  We left with 2 bags full, but we didn't know if was illegal or not, so we tried to cover the bags with my sweatshirt.  Climbing back up the trail was another challenge, we literally had to crawl up it.  They obviously don't want people down there, even though they are proud to advertise it in the town literature.

Exhausted, we headed back to the campground.  We were done with sea glass, but what a success! Joe decided we needed to organize all of our rocks since I had stuffed them in every cubbyhole, and we also had several sacks in the back of the car -- we have been to lots of beaches on this trip.  He said our seaglass today probably weighed 25 lbs.  So we ended up with 2 full gallon ziplock bags and one quart bag.

Once we reloaded all of rocks (and we have some big, pretty ones from various beaches), we showered, then went out for my birthday dinner (Mexican).  We didn't have birthday cake, but we had peach pie waiting for us back at the RV. 

I had seen this huge slab of redwood next to a museum in town, but Joe had never caught sight of it, so on the way to the restaurant, we stopped here.  It was the largest redwood tree known to have grown in this (Mendocino) county.

  It took a 22 foot saw blade (pictured below), and 60 man hours, to fell it.

 I don't know about this being 70 business, but I know I sure am tired tonight.  We had a very full day with the sea glass, which was really special since this is something I've always wanted to do.  On our way home from the restaurant, there was a deer right beside the road, fortunately it did not jump in front of us.  That could have been a very bad ending to our day. 

I received several birthday phone calls and lots of FB birthday wishes, so thank you, everyone.  It is very much appreciated, and nice to be remembered today.  Several of my high school classmates sent me FB birthday wishes -- all of us are hitting the big 7 0 this year, so I guess I'm in good company.

Tomorrow we head inland.  We were in the 60s today, I'm guessing today is the last day of that.  We should be in Sacramento this weekend sometime.

9/13/2017 - Drive to Mendocino

Wednesday - We moved on again today, 90 miles south. We had bought a box of peaches at Costco the other day, and they are all getting ripe at the same time, so this morning, I baked a peach pie!  Before Joe was even out of bed.  We got on the road at 10:05, and we drove through some more redwood forests.  We headed south on the 101 to Leggett, where we picked up California Hwy 1.  That was a mistake.  Up and down the mountains, switchback curves, we probably averaged 20 mph at the most.  It took us an hour to drive 20 miles.  It was like driving the Apache Trail in Arizona, only it was paved.  And we are in a 35 ft. motorhome towing a car.  Joe got lots of upper body exercise on this road!

 Joe said he was either on the gas or the brakes the whole time until we got all the way down to the ocean.  And he said he drove in second gear all the time.  Fortunately, there wasn't much traffic on this road (not everyone is as nuts as us), but we did meet a few cars, and a couple of motorhomes.  And there was some road construction, of course.  Our GPS showed how crooked this road was.

We finally made it down to the coast and saw some pretty scenery, including some arch rocks with waves flowing through them.  The temperature at the coast was in the low 60s and it was misting a little.  I think there are seals and sea lions along here, but I only saw birds today.  And whales go through here in February and November, but we aren't here at the right time to see that.

We are staying right on the ocean in Mendocino, just south of Ft. Bragg, and just south of the intersection with U.S. 20, which we will take when we leave here.  Picking a campground is always a crap shoot, but this one actually has a beach within walking distance (we drove over, though), and it's just a short walk through the sand from the car to the water.  And it has seaglass.  That we can pick up and take home!  (We didn't know it would have seaglass.)   As soon as we got into our campsite, before hooking up anything, we drove back into town for lunch, then stopped at the beach to check it out.  I found a piece of seaglass right away, and then another.  We probably spent 1 1/2 hours there, finding lots of pieces of glass, although they ranged from small to tiny for the most part.  Here's my find, in a 9" pan.

And of course I picked up a few shells, but these were also tiny.

It took a while for Joe to get his "seaglass eye," but eventually he started finding pieces too, and he kicked in almost an equal amount.  So we were pleased with our first attempt.

We went back to the RV and he did his set up, and eventually I fixed some dinner.  We got a tide chart and knew high tide was at 6:01 p.m., so we went back down about 6:30 for our second go-round.  And we found some more!

There's 2 pieces of glass in this next photo -- 2 small pieces (which is mostly what we found). One piece is top right, the second piece is low left.  It was a lot easier to spot than the agates back at Patricks Point.

We worked the beach until it started to get dark.  It is really tiring to do all this bending over and trudging through sand.  And we always get our feet wet.

We found some larger pieces on this run, and some more colored pieces.  Here's our second harvest.

Combined, we filed a 4-ounce plastic container.  Way more than we ever dreamed we would find.  I even found a piece of crockery.  And we found larger pieces after the high tide than we did in the afternoon when the tide was still coming in.  We were the only ones out there tonight, so we got lucky.

Our campsite is pretty narrow, so Joe had to do some manipulation to get us parked and the slides out, but otherwise, it's a pretty decent campground, although pretty old.  And the seaglass beach offsets some of those other issues, so we are happy with this campground.  We have to leave Friday, they have a fishing tournament here and all their sites are taken.  Tomorrow we will drive back up about 10 miles to the actual Seaglass Beach in Ft. Bragg that does not allow you to pick up the glass, and to the state park which is also supposed to have seaglass (we don't know if they let you take it or now), but we are happy to be here and finally find some seaglass!  If we decide we are not ready to leave on Friday, we might just move to a different campground here and spent another day in the cool coastal climate, finding seaglass.