One Lap

Date: 10/01/2013

Day: 5

Location: Coos Bay, OR

Miles Today: 226

Total Miles:  921

The Redwoods, Beautiful Trinidad, The Samoa Cookhouse and more

The Colonel once opined that the Pacific Coast gets increasingly beautiful as you drive north until you arrive at the Olympic Peninsula in furthest Washington, where you are in Eden.  The Colonel got that one right.  If your travels have never taken you up the coast road, do yourself a favor and make the time.  It is hard to absorb, let alone describe how beautiful this place is.  This trip is best done One Lap-wise with no clock and no reason not to stop and look at things.

One of the ways you can tell you are pointed in the right direction is that really big trees march right on down to the sea.  After false starts as far south as Santa Barbara, this process begins about Monterey where Cyprus do the bonsai picturesquely for folks playing golf.  Somewhere around Eureka the really big trees test the salt water – and find it not to their liking, I suspect.   

 

Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

 From time to time Caltrans kindly offers a scenic byway which loops away from highway 101 off among the redwoods, with sufficient views of the Pacific to keep things lively.  One such is a nine mile excursion through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.  These are coastal redwoods, not the really big guys up in Sequoyah; none of then are more than a couple hundred feet tall nor much more than 20 feet in diameter. 

If not the really big trees, certainly big enough

 

 

 

 

Trinidad State Beach

At a stop chosen more or less at random (question not the need) we visited Trinidad state beach (state institutions were working today.)  Previously unknown to us, Trinidad turns out to be a place where one could spend the rest of ones life --  if there are enough people there who read books seriously.   The town of Trinidad, CA (pop ~400) is about 8 miles north of Eureka.  It rests on a bluff perhaps 100 feet above the ocean, well out of tsunami danger -- well, probably so.  (Tsunami warning signs are abundant on the north coast, a new addition since last the Colonel came this way.) With a ridiculously picturesque cove, a working pier and a handful of fishing and research boats, the place looks like a movie set.   Rocks -- most not quite big enough to support plant life but plenty big enough to sink a large ship -- are sprinkled about the ocean.  A headland provides protection for the cove and a target for breakers coming straight south from Alaska.  Not a sea I would choose to swim in, but it was difficult to turn ones back on this place and head north.

 

 



Unidentified tourist surveys the pacific

 The Samoa Cookhouse

 OK, we could have begun this trip without heading south on our northbound leg by following the Rogue river valley west from Grants Pass, Oregon to the sea.  The real reason of heading towards Eureka was to revisit The Samoa Cookhouse.  I love this place.  The food, with a  couple minor exceptions, is good, not great.  It is severely simple.  Unless you have experience in the kitchen, you might not appreciate how difficult it is to make really good simple food.  Good complicated food is actually easier to do.  Of course it is not on a par with your favorite restaurant, say perhaps Donna Thomas in Oakland, but neither is it Denny's or the Olive Garden.  The food is not boring, it's simple.  The exceptions are the especially good vegetable soup and the giant loves of fresh white bread.

It is not worth a journey, but if you can torque your head into the proper mindset, give this place a try.  

Yes, rather like a barn

 

Samoa was a company owned town, supporting the logging industry.   The cookhouse was the cookhouse.

 

You will meet new friends if the place is anything like busy.

 

Giant loaves of white bread, 8" across, 18 inches long.

 

Really good vegetable soup, which the colonel has never managed to make.

 

The bill of faire, you say not I'll have this or that; you say yes or no.

 

Weaverville

Before our close encounter of the third kind yesterday with the local fauna, we strolled through the small town of Weaverville.    Weaverville is on CA 299 between Redding and Eureka.  The stop was mostly to reiterate to ourselves that we are supposed to stop and look at things on this trip.  It takes discipline to get into the proper mellow attitude towards travel that One Lap demands.  You gotta go slow, or what's the point.  The cool thing about Weaverville is that it has been there for well over a hundred years and glories in the fact.  The buildings have signs identifying both the present occupant and the occupant as of 150 years ago.  The doctors office, for example is adjacent to his home; one thinks of Mayberry.  It has two shingles, one for the present incumbent, one for his predecessor in 1882.  Cool

Elk?

 There are ambient elk on highway 101 in Oregon.  They are nominally kept in fenced pastures, but the grass is apparently greener....  Anyway, today the big guy with the big horns was hanging around on the public side of the fence.  He gave the Colonel a particularly dirty look, judging the suspicious dent pattern in our trusty Acura to be just what it, in fact, is. 

Some of the big guys female friends.  The big guy kept his back to the sun and declined to be photographed.

 Wellington Boot, Col