These Naked Ladies were growing right outside our motel:
See, no leaves at all, just the flower stalk. OK, so that was another slightly mean trick to play on people using search engines.
The woman running the Gualala Country Inn told us that the best place for tide pools was McKerriker state park north of Fort Bragg. I hadn’t been planning to go that far north, but Arlene wanted to see tide pools and redwoods, so we did.
I personally have never understood why the Big Sur area is more famous than the Mendocino County coastline. I think the Mendocino coast is more scenic. Rocks like these are a common sight on the little beaches down the cliff from the road.
One of the few lighthouses along the coast is this one at Point Arena
Twenty miles north of Fort Bragg the road leaves the coast and goes through the coast range of mountains. There was twenty miles of very winding road that took most of an hour. Gasoline prices had been sky high, I mean up to $3.59 for a gallon of regular, along most of the Mendocino coast, but I felt that you’d have to pay me a lot to drive a tank truck along that road.
When we came out of the hills onto a less winding road in Leggett, we saw a sign for Drive-Thru Tree Park. I was ready for a break. There was a $5 admission charge to get in to where you could drive through a redwood tree. I felt that the park should have paid these people just to have the 1954 Chevy on the premises. It felt like a mid-twentieth century tourist trap — the tunnel had been cut through the tree in the 1930s — and this car was just perfect for it.
People behind us asked the woman running the gift shop whether drivers ever got stuck in the tree. She said, “Very rarely. They usually come to their senses and back out.” There was a big pickup a few vehicles behind us that had to do that. Our rented Corolla was no problem.
We drove halfway along the Avenue of Giants, a 32-mile stretch of road through redwood forest. I didn’t try to take any pictures; you have to be there to believe the scale.
We drove back south to Willets, found a motel, and had too big a supper at a Chinese restaurant called the Yum Yum Tree.