Jan continues our Spring-but-also-Winter weekend with a morning hike in Alpine Lakes Wilderness. He’s interested in trying out a new pair of micro-spikes, which are sort of like traction chains for your boots. He picks Mason Lake as a destination that’s less than an hour away but also likely to still be well above snow level. The hike involves a steep 3000’ climb — and two-thirds of the trail follows Mason Creek straight up the mountainside. As expected, there is plenty of snow, and the micro-spikes work like a charm.
Bree gets on a bike again. Bree’s going on a 12-day class trip soon, and one of their activities will be a bike ride. She hasn’t ridden a bike for a long time, so she wants to get used to it again. She and Jan get out their bikes, pump up the tires, then go for a quick ride around our neighborhood.
Bree and Jan bike to dinner. Since Bree’s renewed her interest in biking before her big trip, Jan proposes they bike somewhere nearby for dinner. Bree picks Pagliacci Pizza, which isn’t far, but does involve going over a modest hill. On the ride back, Jan suggests they go down the twisty switchbacks on Lake Washington Boulevard down to McGilvra Boulevard. Bree’s slightly apprehensive, but does fine — up until the turn onto McGilvra, where she makes a turn that’s almost too wide. She whacks the side of her bike alongside the curb, but is fine.
Jan sets Bree up with his old Apple Watch for her upcoming school trip. The students aren’t allowed to take phones with them, so Bree wants something she can use to: 1) wake her up in the morning, and 2) listen to music. After Bree’s set up the watch, she plays with it for a while, and loads it with a playlist to listen to.
As she’s walking around the house, she can’t find her phone — so she decides to use the watch to find the phone. The phone begins buzzing — it’s in her pocket.
Bree is puttering around the house, then steps up on our family room coffee table and dances around a bit. As she does this, she sings a silly song Jan made up years ago when Bree was just an infant. Jan would hold infant Bree upright like a doll and dance her on the dining room table. He’d sing; “I like to dance on the table, dance with me if you are able… Dance, dance, dance, dance.” This amused Anya and Liya (and Jan). Bree obviously doesn’t remember that, but has heard the story many times.
Bree proposes a Mother’s Day bike ride. Jan, Angela, and Bree make a short, pleasant ride down Lake Washington Boulevard to the I-90 bridge and back.
Liya finishes her freshman year at Yale. She’ll leave for a summer program in Taiwan at the end of the month, but we’re very happy to have her with us until then.
Bree leaves for a 12-day trip with her 8th grade class to Germany and Austria. The school hasn’t run such a trip for the past two years, so it feels like a minor miracle that Bree’s actually getting to do this trip.
Angela drives Bree to a very early 6:30 am drop off at SeaTac, and then the class is off.
(The photo above is from Munich. Bree is sitting in the front row, third from right, sporting a bluish shirt, a black mask, and the finger-gun-under-the-chin pose preferred by Korean pop stars.)
Jan, Angela, and Liya fly to Northern California for a week of redwoods and coastal towns. Last summer, Jan and Anya biked down the coast, and seeing the redwood forests was a highlight. Angela said that she wanted to see the redwoods, too, which led Jan to plan this trip to coincide with Bree’s absence. Since Liya is back from school, she gets to join as well.
Our flight to Redding, CA, is uneventful. But when we get off the plane at the tiny Redding Airport around 7:30 pm, we discover the rental car desk closed hours ago at 3:00. They hadn’t mentioned the small detail of their limited business hours. We head outside the airport to catch a cab – but it’s not the size of airport that has cabs waiting. Jan calls a taxi company, which quotes an hour and a half wait.
Mercifully, a nice man named Dennis and his wife Anita offer a ride into town.
Redwoods trip, Day 2. Our good friend Siri, who moved to Redding from Seattle a while back, meets us for breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant. It’s great to see her and catch up with her.
After breakfast, Jan takes a cab back to the airport to obtain our elusive rental car, while Angela and Liya take a short walk to the Sundial Bridge over the Sacramento River.
We reunite, pack up the car, then head out for a 3-hour drive to Redwoods National Park on the coast. We stop for lunch in Weaverville, one of the few spots of civilization in the forests of northern California. We’re preparing to settle for fast food, but notice Raliberto’s Taco Shop instead. It’s pretty good.
After another brief stop in the next bit of civilization, Willow Creek, Jan drives off the highway and onto Bald Hills Road. This is a back entrance into Redwoods National Park, and will allow us to see a bit more of the park and avoid having to double-back along a stretch of Highway 101.
Bald Hills Road is the back entrance for a reason. After a short while, it begins a steep set of switchbacks climbing up, up, up. The pavement alternates with gravel, then disappears entirely. We don’t see another car for at least an hour. Jan’s primary worry is that, this early in the season, we may come to a downed tree across the road and have to make the long way back out the way we came. He’s relieved when we come to one such downed tree that’s already been cut away; someone’s already opened the road up again for the season.
One benefit of taking this twisty, rutted, bumpy road for an hour is that, near the top of the ridge, Angela spots a baby brown bear cub at the side of the road. We stop, and the cub scampers across. We don’t see signs of the mother, and drive slowly past. Liya spots the bear taking a final look at us from above the road, then it disappears into the brush.
We’re all very happy when we reach the top of the ridge, where Bald Hills Road once again turns to pavement. We drive north along the ridge, looking out across wide meadows.
Our goal for today is to walk the short loop at the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. As soon as we get out of the car, we’re all happy to see our first giant redwood tree towering over the parking lot. The loop trail is beautiful, and though it’s short, it takes us a while to complete it because we stop every 20 seconds to marvel at the size of the trees. We also have to step carefully — the trail is very muddy.
Back in the car, we drive out of the park and turn south on Highway 101. We’re now following the path that Jan and Anya biked last summer on their trip from Seattle to Stanford, and Jan’s happy to see landmarks that he remembers.
We drive to the small town of Trinidad, where we’re staying at the Trinidad Bay Bed & Breakfast. Tyler, one of the hosts, gets us into our rooms.
Finding dinner in town is a little tricky. The Beachcomber Cafe Jan remembers fondly is closed for the day, and won’t open again until we’ve left town the day after tomorrow. There’s a decent-looking place called the Eatery that closes at 5:30 pm. The seafood restaurant by the harbor has a similar early closing time.
By process of elimination, we end up getting a takeout dinner from the Lighthouse Grill and eat it back in our B&B.
Redwoods trip, Day 3. We have breakfast in the B&B dining room with a father and son from Denmark. The son goes to school in Boulder, CO, and is traveling a bit around the West Coast before going home.
This morning we have a reservation for the trailhead at Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. We’ve heard it’s a “can’t miss” hike. The drive in is on another dirt road, although thankfully not so rutted as yesterday’s road. There’s some fun getting to drive through a small creek.
Fern Canyon is a beautiful as advertised. Fern Creek has a cut a deep cleft whose sides are lined with maidenhead ferns and other plants. The floor of the canyon is wide and flat, so the creek meanders down it. Having read online that you have to walk through the water for much of the (short) trip down the canyon, all three of us are wearing shoes or sandals that can get wet. The water is freezing cold.
After Fern Canyon, Angela drives us back out so that she can have fun driving through the small creek. We leave the park in search of someplace to get lunch. Jan’s hoping that the Snack Shack in the tiny town of Orick is open. It was closed on last year’s bike ride — and it turns out that it’s also closed today. There are two markets in Orick, one of which is a gas station mini-mart that sells coffee so bad that Anya called it “the coffee of despair”. We go to the other market. We cobble together a small picnic lunch of cheese, crackers, and other snacks.
We drive back into the state park and eat our lunch at the Elk Meadow picnic area. (No elk on view, sadly.) Afterwards we do the ~3 mile loop of the Trillium Falls Trail. The falls are pretty small, only about 10 feet tall, but the trail is nice.
We drive up the Newton Drury Scenic Parkway, which is lined with giant redwoods. We miss the sign for the “Big Tree Wayside” and so go too far, but it’s a gorgeous drive so not a problem. The Big Tree itself is a tree that is, in fact, big.
Last night we missed the chance to have dinner at The Eatery in Trinidad because they close at 5:30 pm, so tonight we get there before closing time. The place is hopping, and the food is pretty good.
Redwoods trip, Day 4. Over breakfast at the B&B we talk with a couple traveling from Tennessee. The husband is an executive at a company that makes ceiling fans, so he’s very happy to talk about ceiling fans. The breakfast is fine, but then we meet the other B&B owner for the first time. He turns out to be a rabid anti-vaxxer who delivers a long, rambling list of political positions before we can find a polite time to leave.
There’s no coffee to be had in town, but Angela and Jan discover that the Trinidad art gallery is quite nice. Angela ultimately purchases a selection of cards and a small painting for her office.
Liya joins us for a walk down the steep path to the Trinidad harbor. It’s a beautiful day again, and we can see a number of seals in the water.
As we leave town, Jan eschews the highway in favor of the winding and aptly-named Scenic Drive that runs atop bluffs for several miles south of town. We stop in the town of Arcata for a decent lunch at the Phoenix Cafe.
We drive past Eureka and head inland towards Humboldt Redwoods State Park, where we begin driving along the beautiful, redwood-lined Avenue of the Giants. We park at what Google Maps says is a trailhead for the Bull Creek North trail. As it happens, we’re not at a real trailhead, although the tall redwoods keep the forest floor clear enough that we can find our way straight through the forest to find the actual trail. We walk on the Bull Creek North trail to the Big Trees area, where we have cross Bull Creek on a giant fallen redwood. The Big Trees area does indeed have more big trees.
We continue driving along the Avenue of the Giants to the little town of Miranda, where we’ve got an AirBnB cottage for the night. We’re delighted that one of the town’s restaurants, the Redwood Palace, is open for dinner. It’s quite good.
Redwoods trip, Day 5. We walk down the street to the Sips espresso shack for breakfast. Jan says hello to a European couple that’s biking down the coast like he and Anya did.
We drive back up the Avenue of the Giants to take a look at the Founder’s Tree, and then do a short loop through the Rockefeller Forest. More giant trees everywhere.
We finally head out of the redwood forest and get back on Highway 101. We stop for lunch at Peg House, one of the only places to eat along this stretch of road. Before turning onto Highway 1 and heading for the coast, we stop at a cheesy tourist trap to drive through a big redwood tree. After that, it’s a long, long winding road down to the coast.
We arrive in Mendocino in the middle of the afternoon and check into the Sea Rock Inn. Our room gets some road noise from Highway 1, but the view out the front over the ocean is amazing.
At some point, the power goes out, then comes back on. The town’s power is out, but the inn appears to have a generator.
When we head into town for dinner at a nice French restaurant, we find that it’s closed due to the power outage. We hastily call any decent-sounding restaurant within 15 miles, but almost every one is either closed because of the power outage, or closed because of staffing difficulties. Even the nearby city of Fort Bragg has no power.
We happen to call an out-of-the-way Thai restaurant that is serving dinner, so wait there for takeout and bring it back to the inn.
Redwoods trip, Day 6. We for a morning walk around the Mendocino headland, then follow it around into town. We have amazing pastries for lunch at the Good Life Bakery. We shop around the town a bit, buying some socks from the sock shop, a cute hat for Liya, and some jams and chocolates.
We spend the afternoon hanging out in the hotel room, then have try again to have dinner at Cafe Beaujolais. Tonight they’re back in business, and we have a nice meal.
Redwoods trip, Day 7. It’s back to the Good Life Bakery for breakfast. We’re in line for the bakery’s opening, and it fills up quickly after we’ve sat down.
We drive inland, stopping for a short walk through one final redwood forest in Hendy Woods State Park. From there we continue to Healdsburg and check into a chichi wine country hotel. Jan’s arranged appointments for all three of us to get massages at their spa, and afterwards we have lunch by the pool. We hang out there until our room is ready.
We have dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, Hazel Hill. Jan and Angela go for the course tasting menu which is excellent.
Redwoods trip, Day 8. Jan and Liya have breakfast at Hazel Hill. They overhear a staffer pointing out a nest of birds in a trellis nearby, and it’s fun to see the baby bird heads. The three of us spend the rest of the morning by the pool.
Our flight back home isn’t until the evening, so we drive into Healdsburg for a tapas lunch at Bravas. We spend an hour or so reading on a shady bench in the Healdsburg Plaza park, then walk around a bit.
Our flight is out of tiny Sonoma Airport. The only food option for dinner is a sandwich counter, but it’s closed, so Jan has to leave security and go back out into the outer building so he can purchase snacks for everyone from a vending machine.
Skye and Jared come up to Seattle with their boys to visit for a weekend. Lyn joins us for dinner at our house.
Jan and Jared do a morning hike up Mt. Washington at the western edge of the Cascade Mountains. Jan’s training for a challenging hike at the end of July, and Jared’s game to come along. There’s light rain when they get to the trailhead, but it eventually tapers off. They hit packed snow on the trail about 2/3 of the way up. After climbing 3000’ they finally reach the top. While the view is probably spectacular on a nice day, all they can see are clouds. On the way back down, it begins to rain harder and harder, so they’re both pretty soaked by the time they get back to the car. The weather aside, it’s a fun hike.
In the evening, we have another family dinner at our house.
Liya leaves for a summer in Taiwan. Late in the evening, Angela takes Liya to the airport for a long flight to Taipei, after which Liya will enter a 7+ day quarantine. Once she’s clear, she’ll join 3 other Yale students in a shared rental apartment. They’ll all be studying Mandarin in a program at National Taiwan University in Taipei.
We meet up with Skye and Jared’s family at Elliot Bay Book Company to hang out for a bit. Afterwards we walk over to Cal Anderson park so Leif and Auden can run around before they have to get into the car for the long drive back down to Salem, OR.