Galina YoungI work on ‘my’ bench again while Sol packs up camp and girls catch the last frogs. They come through town to pick me up around noon.
We say good bye to Mendocino and are headed up the coast almost to the border between California and Oregon.
We make a quick stop in Eurika. Sol convinces me that since we were unpleasantly surprised with cell signal availability at Van Damme park we should diversify our network access devices. We already have AT&T, so, he sets up a contract on the drive and picks up a Verizon MiFi . We have high hopes.
Next, we drive through mountains and the drive us beautiful. We ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the deep drops on one side of us and cliffs on the other. All the while Sol is pretty occupied with keeping our caravan on the skinny road. I should ask how his shoulder muscles are feeling the next day.
It is somewhere around these mountains, as trees around us are getting bigger, that we collectively forget to join girls’ back to school night zoom call as their cyber school starts in 4 days.
We drive about 4 hours to our next site – Prairie Creek Redwood State Park. At the sunset, we spice our drive up with a beach walk to stretch our and puppy’s legs.
It is cool and waters look rough and choppy.
A couple of huge waves surprises kids and the dog. Too bad they were on their last pair of clean pants.
Around 7, we pull into our spot at a camp site at dusk and it is probably the most serene site we have stayed at.
It is nestled between a redwood forest and a prairie known to have many Elk in it. It is so quiet that all the campers (at least adult ones)
feel compelled to speak in hush tones.
We make dinner and enjoy the fire until it is completely dark.
In the night, we have a visitor that Sol spots. A bear comes to hang around our trailer and Sol hears it’s breathing near our open windows. Pup peacefully sleeps through the whole thing.
In the morning, we take it easy. Neither Verizon nor AT&T have a spec of service in the park, so, I use public WiFi offered at the ranger station, to request a day off. I am glad I did.
The site has no hookups so we employ girls to run to the nearby water spigot and bring jugs of water to fill Trailer Swift’s water tanks (the rig finally has gotten the name). They each make $3 while me and Sol relax with the coffee at the edge of Elk prairie.
We do some laundry and I shower for the 1st time in 4 days. It feels cathartic.
Girls discover an abundance of blackberry bushes around our site with ripe and juicy berries. We all eat our fill and they make various concoctions that
include blackberries, some chocolate syrup, and leftovers of vanilla ice cream they find in the freezer. Must be delectable.
In the Elk prairie we see a million of dragon files, some deer, but not much in Elk department. I guess we met our Elk quota when we saw two Elk bulls fighting on the side of the road the night before.
In the afternoon we take a hike through gargantuan redwoods. The size of them is astonishing. Girls climb in and out and all around while
we are going through the woods. They are also given a scavenger hunt and are working hard to earn their junior park rangers badges.
We have lunch by the little creek and eat more blackberries for dessert. The weather is perfect and relaxing and some spots in the park
look like they could be on some other planet… like Pandora.
We take off from the park in late afternoon and we don’t really have a plan besides wanting to stop somewhere along the mountain river and swim.
We are on the lookout for some swim holes along Smith river. The day is too perfect though and all swimming holes are pretty crowded, so, we move on as Sol is trying to remember the swimming spots him and Gordon stopped at on the way to Oregon Country Fair when he was a little boy.
Somewhere there we enter Oregon. I can tell by the smell of marijuana crop lining the highway.
Good bye California.. we will see you soon!
It is after 5 when we find a spot on Rogue river to jump in the water. The water is cold and we are tired. The goal is to get pretty close to Crater Lake – our next destination- so, I try my luck by calling some camp grounds around there: “Howdy! Thank you for calling this here Crater Lake Camp, We sorry we missed your here phone call…if you like to make them reservations, mosey over to option 2…..” I get lucky though. We are booked for the night at the site with full hookups!! Sasha takes a nice long bath that night.
