Had our now customary free brekkie at the motel and then took a drive into Santa Cruz to have a look at the place and hopefully see a better side of it!
But it was just as crappy downtown - everything a bit grotty - and when parked by the waterfront it got a lot worse! Dozens of layabouts sleeping rough, many empty buildings and generally a slummy area. We walked past a long stretch of fun parks and food stalls, past a strip of freshly raked sand that had volley ball courts marked out, to the Pier. It was the 100th Anniversary of the Pier but not much had been done - a few food outlets and kayak and boat shops but little else! There were a large number of seals on a floating platform, but as you can gather I wasn't impressed and we quickly hit the road north again.
We left the coast and headed inland to pick up I101N again to get into San Francisco and to cross the Golden Gate Bridge (something I've always wanted to do). After a brief rest stop for a coffee and for Mumsie and Jasmine to buy some fresh fruit, we pushed on into the outskirts of SF and before we knew it the huge red pylons of the bridge could be seen!
We had been a bit wary of tolls on the bridge (we didn't buy a Toll Pass with our car rental) but some research last night told us that there were only tolls on the south bound lanes, so we headed on past all the delightfully quaint SF houses and onto the bridge! Luckily for us there was no fog at all and the views (limited for me) were quite amazing! It was all over way too soon and then we were powering on past Sausalito and out of the city.
We stayed on the interstate for a couple of hours, passing some small farms and vineyards and then got into the State Forrests again. At Leytonville we came across a huge National Fire Service set up that was absolutely gi-normous! Along a stretch of about 2 kilometres there were hundreds of fire trucks, a few sky-crane heli tankers, dozens of dozers and more tents and marquees than you could poke a stick at!!!! There have been several wild fires in this northern part of California all started by lightning and this incident operation was set up to fight one right on the highway covering about 5,000 hectares! I accessed the Fire Service website and got all the stats and there were actually 2,000 firefighters, 160 tenders, 7 helicopters and a dozen water tankers at the site we saw! Amazingly when I read more about the fires there were similar set ups for each one! So much infrastructure!
Further up the road we came across the "Avenue of the Giants" which was a 60 kilometre drive through some of the tallest Redwood trees in the world. It was similar to our own "Valley of the Giants" and just as impressive - some of the specimens we stopped to look at took 15 - 20 paces to get around the base! It was a beautiful drive.
We kept on through the forests, wishing that everything wasn't so dry - the rocky rivers would have looked amazing with a bit more flow.
Arrived in Eureka, a busy fishing port, quite late and managed to get a couple of rooms at a central motel. The town is smallish, with a few timber mills as well as the fishing fleet and some dairy farms.
Across the road from our motel was a nice hotel with a great bistro and we enjoyed a couple of beers to wind down before our dinner. It's been another very interesting day on the road - such a variety of sights and scenes!