We woke up at our hotel this morning and packed up our things so that we were already set when it was time to leave. After taking showers Matt, Dan, Allister, and I made our way to the complementary breakfast being held in the lobby and boy was that treat. It was easily the second best breakfast on the whole trip, next to D.O.G's of course, but still the sausage was perfect, the eggs were covered in cheese and weren't watery at all, the bagels weren't hard or anything, oh I could write a whole page just on the food! Anyway, were were heading into our final days of the trip and everyone was beginning to get a bit antsy. After our breakfast we were in for a long drive from Oakland near San Francisco to Crescent City, all the way at the top of California, in the Redwoods basically. After a few hours of driving we were all surprised with a visit at Point Reyes, a park located on Californias seashore. It was very window out at the time and was a bit misty but we did not let that deter us from making the hike. The views of the shoreline were spectacular and the cliffside made for some very nice photos.
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| California Coastline as seen from Point Reyes |
We continued down the path which eventually led us to a set of stairs that went most of the way down to the cliff, this is where the lighthouse was positioned. Once we reached the bottom the first building we walked into was an old living quarters, where the lighthouse tender likely slept and where he controlled the services to the area.
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| Stairs leading to the Point Reyes Lighthouse |
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| Maintenance Building at the Point Reyes Lighthouse |
Going through the building we emerged with the lighthouse in front of us and you were able to walk inside where we saw the actual light used to notify sailors during dark and misty nights. One of the park historians was in the room and told the story of the light and how everything we saw was original parts and that even though the light was decommissioned, it is still turned on every few months to ensure it is still functional. I thought this was a pretty cool thing to see, its not often you get to see the inside of a lighthouse and the quality of craftsmanship that went into building the light was marvelous to behold.
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| Point Reyes Lighthouse light |
We left from Point Reyes and headed back towards our destination, passing dozens of signs for the Redwoods on the way, along with many other signs referencing bigfoot which I thought was funny. We made one last stop before the last leg of our drive to discuss some issues with the Redwoods as we would be sleeping in Redwood National Forest for the night and taking a short hike the next morning. Tait explained that the park exists simply for tree preservation and that it is a combination of 3 state parks. The reason the redwoods get so big is because of their location along the coast where moist air from the ocean forms a dense fog most of the year. The trees owe their success to their ability to make use of all this moisture as well as being heavily resistant to insects and fire which gives them extreme longevity, living thousands of years in some cases. Back in 1964 only 15% of the redwoods was still alive, this prompted legislatures to enact a stronger statute to protect these forest, this led to the site becoming a national park, with surrounding national forests to still allow logging but only in certain areas. Towards the evening much of the drive took us along the Northern California Coast and the views we got to see were spectacular, Tait even let us made a stop on the beach so that we could get some pictures of the amazing sunset. After the quick photo session we were back to soldiering on through the night.
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| California Sunset |
Well, the drive took a little longer than we had anticipated, about 10 hours since we had left our hotel in the morning so it was roughly midnight by the time we got to our campsite in the Redwoods. By this time everyone was so beat that we just threw all of our food and scented items into the bear boxes, set up our tents and hit the hey for the night.
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