Good Day ~ West Coast RV Adventure 2023 ~ Day 17

Today’s gonna be a good day, I can feel it. We already had a nice walk along the beach this morning, and then I got to lay in the sun while Mom and Dad did all the work to break camp, Yep, it’s gonna be a good day! 

 

We said goodbye to Caspar Beach, and then Mom gave me shoulder rubs for a while once we started driving. Okay, I may have begged for them. But yep, a good day so far! 

 

 

Until it wasn’t…We got to the Mendocino Botanical Gardens, and they left me in the LHOW. What? How rude! So I was still protesting at the window when Dad came back for me! Turns out they offered a reciprocal agreement with Dallas Arboretum AND they let dogs come smell the flowers too! It IS a REALLY good day!! And boy was this place amazing! Check out the gargantuan calla lilies at their front door. They were taller than Dad!! Same with the rhododendrons. They grow up to 80 feet tall and bloom from December through June. Mom told Dad how big they grew in these parts and how they grow wild, but Dad didn’t really believe her. See for yourself!  This place is cool too because it has all the pretty, well taken care of gardens, and then you go through a gate into a natural area. We walked out to the ocean in the natural part and then returned to the fancy gardens. And same warning as before…there’s gonna be a lot of pictures! 

 

Next we went to check out a lighthouse, the Point Cabrillo Lighthouse. Well, it wasn’t so much “we.” They said I’d already walked enough for one day, and it was a .5 mile walk to the lighthouse. Ha! Good thing they left me behind. They same guy that measured distances in Death Valley, must have measured this one! Dad said it was like 1.75 miles! Lucky me! 

This lighthouse is important cause it’s one of the oldest and had a special kind of light too.  Dad said the most interesting thing was that a wave came all the way up the 30 foot cliff and crashed through the lighthouse museum last January during one of California’s big winter storms. That’s crazy!! There was also a museum that showed what life was like for lighthouse keepers. Once again, Mom said she was SO glad that God didn’t have her born into that life. She never would have made it to 6 am each day! Hahaha! But the funniest thing happened when Mom and Dad finally hauled themselves back up the .5 mile (NOT) walk up the hill to the LHOW. A cute couple from Tennessee was walking past the LHOW, and they asked if that was ours. Dad said yes, and she said, “You have one ferocious guard dog in it!!” Yep, that’s me. Ferociously protecting my LHOW! 

 

 

We kept trekking north and had to say goodbye to the Pacific Ocean again at Rockport for awhile. Highway 1 goes inland over a really long and windy mountain pass road to join Highway 101. It was really twisty and turny with some really big trees. Dad was a superstar driver. My tummy felt a little queasy for a while, but luckily no one got sick! 

I bet you think this day can’t get any better, right? Nope, you’re SO wrong!   Next we passed Benbow, a pretty special area that my brothers used to camp in with Granny and Gramps in their fifth wheel camper. They golfed there and played in the river too. Mom joined them once with Grandma, so she knew where it was able and could show Dad. Mom and Grandma stayed in the really old inn that was hiding behind the trees. Maybe you can see some of those places below. 

 

Then we took an off ramp with a funny name. It was called “Avenue of the Giants.” What’s that supposed to mean? Well, let me tell you, we saw the most GINORMOUS TREES ever!! I mean, saying they were huge just doesn’t begin to describe them. Mom was oohing and aahing so much, that finally Dad pulled over so he could see them too. He chose the perfect place too. The trees were HUGE and the smells were even better! There was a fresh earthy smell that I loved! The “giants” were redwood trees, similar to the coastal redwoods we saw in Big Sur. The biggest one we saw was 29 of Dad’s paces around, so he said probably about a 28 foot diameter. Boy, if you were ever thinking that you were “all that,” you should spend some time with these guys. I felt smaller than I’ve ever felt here. 

 

We all got in the LHOW feeling a little humbler, I think, and grateful for God’s amazing creation. Seeing those giants was really a special experience. We had a ways to drive still, and Dad was hungry. So Mom made some snacks for them to eat along the way. Despite my best efforts, I didn’t get any. Driving through Eureka was a little like driving through San Francisco…there was that funny smell again. 

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And we’re back to the Pacific Ocean! Yay! And the rhododendrons keep amazing us. We made it to our campsite, Azalea Glen RV Park in Trinidad. It was so pretty and also very different from any of our other sites. We had a deck at the back of the site that overlooked a pond with lily pads on it. And there were HUGE rhododendron bushes. They were so big they looked like small hills. Mom and Dad enjoyed their happy juice on the deck and I kept trying to find what was singing to us. Mom said they were frogs. The lady who checked us in said they’d had a bear in the campsite lately, so I was extra alert watching for him and trying to find those mysterious frogs. As we ate dinner outside, bats started flying through the air. It was fun to watch them. I wonder what it’d be like to fly? 

 

Speaking of dinner, I ate two bowls of food today after walking so much. Dad said they walked 5.5 miles. They were hungry too. But boy, oh boy! It was really a good, nope make that a great day!! And we were all exhausted…in the best kind of way! 

 

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