Sunday, September 14th, 2014

I Drove to Oregon: Day 2

Day 1 | Day 2 | Days 3-7 | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10

The agenda on this day was redwoods—lots of redwoods. But we did wake up in Ferndale, and I did leave my camera at Poppa Joe's, necessitating an unscheduled return trip some hours hence...so more did happen than just the trees.

That's downtown Ferndale for you. Apparently there was a regional dairy-farming boom around the turn of the 20th century, and Ferndale was big into dairy, and the thing you did back then if you could was build a lot of Victorian homes and storefronts.

I never saw The Majestic with Jim Carrey, but you know what, this is where it was shot.

This is right about when I put my camera on the floor next to my chair...

...and this is two hours later, on our initial approach into the Lady Bird Johnson Grove, when I realized I'd never picked that camera up.

The trip back to Ferndale from LBJG includes the absolute worst section of the 101, i.e. the part that goes straight through downtown Eureka with like eleven traffic lights in rapid succession. So that it wouldn't feel like a total waste of time, we stopped at Taste, an excellent recommendation from 500Benzfriend JRiz. The Eureka area has a handful of craft breweries, and Taste offers a nice sampling of their wares all in one place, plus live local oysters with various delicious garnishes. There was also cheese.

And local soap from a sheep farm. Not to be confused, as it was for a while by me, with sheep soap.

Back at LBJG, camera in hand, we commenced our downright amazing walk through the trees. Perspective provided by mrs500benz in the blue jacket at bottom. Wikipedia says coastal redwoods over 300 feet tall are common, with 41 living trees surpassing 360 feet. The tallest living tree measures 379.3 feet (it's in a different grove). A previous record-holder, the "Dyerville Giant" (370 feet), was an estimated 1,600 years old when it fell down in 1991.

Tall.

Real tall.

Ditto.

Also wide. Not as wide as the Giant Sequoias, but pretty respectable for something that grows out of the ground.

This one's not even that wide.

But this one is. The widest recorded redwood is about 26 feet in diameter, my research reveals. Maybe we found it.

Nice to find a part of California that's not totally parched. I gather the perpetual fog takes care of that.

Here mrs500benz demonstrates the racing line through a hollow trunk.

Then she climbed a fallen giant!

Then there was more driving through redwoods. This is still the 101.

It seems to be about 60 degrees all the time where these guys grow.

Pit stop in Crescent City, CA. I consumed an estimated 50 McNuggets on this trip. Hey, McDonald's is always open. Buffalo and ranch is the way to go.

This was briefly my all-time range record in the 500 Benz. We made it from Ferndale to LBJG to Ferndale to LBJG to what I believe was the outskirts of Eugene, OR. As the final post in this series shall document, driving downhill from Lake Tahoe to Santa Clarita is considerably easier work.

Still, 23.9 mpg isn't bad (17.86 gallons), especially considering that I periodically found closed courses on which to do things like this. Even if an audiobook about the Japanese-American internment camps happened to be playing at the time.

Days 3-7 Forecast: Portland lifestyle choices, a welcome golf interlude and a 707-horsepower Dodge Challenger.

posted in: Road Trips  Videos  

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