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.