Northern California: From Redwoods To Vineyards
Happy Friday and hopefully you are as ready for this blog post as you are for the weekend. Last week I told you as much as possible about Oregon, my all-time favourite US state, this week we’re headed on to California. As you might have noticed, these blog posts are getting longer and longer along the road trip, so grab a cup of tea or coffee and let’s get right into it.
Initially, we had planned to head from Florence directly to Crater Lake and then on to the Redwood National and State Parks, but it turned out that Crater Lake would be a very huge detour, so just a few days before departing we changed our plans. As we didn’t want to spend 2 more days at our destination after Crater Lake, we were looking for something in between, and soon we found Happy Camp. You have never heard of Happy Camp? Well, me neither.
Happy Camp is located in the middle of nowhere, close to the border to Oregon. We drove a few hours on a narrow windy road through forests, met a deer along the way until we arrived in a small village obsessed with Sasquatch. How do I know they are obsessed with Sasquatch? Well, there’s a big statue of him right in the middle of the village. Besides this statue, there is not much in Happy Camp: a supermarket, one pizzeria and it seemed as if our Motel was the only one around.
Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun in Happy Camp. We were happy to spend some calm days on the mountainside, went hiking on a lovely town trail and as our hosts were the kindest people ever, we even found a place to swim in Klamath River. We were not able to find it on our first try (we turned around exactly 50 metres before we would have arrived) our host escorted us precisely to the destination, and we had so much fun and were even joined by 5 lovely dogs. I did not expect much of Happy Camp but I have to admit the hosts made our stay very great and we really enjoyed some days of resting and without 50 activities a day.
From Happy Camp, we wanted to head to Eureka through the Redwood National and State Parks. Thanks to our hosts, we took a longer route to get there, but it’s the best decision to always take the scenic route. And so did we! The Redwood Highway leads exactly through the National Park, and so it is one of the few National Parks you don’t have to pay a fee for: but I’d be willing to pay any kind of price to see those majestic Redwoods!
Redwoods are some of the most impressive trees I’ve ever seen: they’re also called coast redwood, coastal redwood and California redwood and belong to the Sequoia species. It is common for them to reach a hight of over 60 metres and the tallest ones are over 115 metres high. The diameter of these trees can range up to more than 5 metres. We stopped in Eureka for the night, a town that has not much to offer besides a beach, some restaurants and a pier and when we continued our journey southwards the next day, we decided to stop at 2 Drive-Thru Trees. If you were a bit lost with all the numbers of the sizes of these trees, maybe seeing a completely normally sized car drive through it helps you realize the dimensions better. But comprehending how tall these trees are is impossible, as even standing right in between them is simply surreal.
Our next stop was Napa. This city is the centre of Napa Valley, just about an hour from San Francisco. While Napa is surrounded by millions of vineyards, we were more interested in what this city has to offer. Here, Americans – pretty successfully – tried to copy Europe. Along the river they built some kind of waterfront, you can actually ride a gondola (there are no prices advertised so I guess it would be rather expensive) and everything wants to look Italian. I was pretty impressed with how well they did it. Just around the golden hour we also went to the Napa Wine Train, and I think if you are interested in wines (we were not mainly), this could be a very cool experience!
As you might have noticed, this blog post ends right before we headed to San Francisco, so you already know what next week will be about! If you are curious about San Fran and if it really lives up to the hype, come back next week to hear more about it!
