Redwood Coast

Ok, this is a bit overdue, but we took a substantial detour when we picked Race up at Nana and Papa's house in Oregon. On the first day of our detour we went to Carter Lake, the Rogue River Gorge and then on to Crescent City where we played on the beach, took a walk on the breakwater and visited the lighthouse. We spent the night at a quaint little hotel on the highway called the Curly Redwood Lodge. The hotel is built primarily from redwood and all of the redwood came form the same tree. The next day we made our way down to Fort Bragg doing all of the tourist stuff on the way. We went to Big Trees, hiked a couple of miles through Redwood National Park, played on the beach, waded in a river and tried to catch frogs and tadpoles and taught Race to skip rocks. Crossing the Klamath River Elizabeth enthused, "there's a whale in the river, pull over." We stopped and walked out on to the highway bridge with all of the other looky-loo's and took some pictures of the whale. We were saddened to learn later that the whale died the next day. We spent the night in Fort Bragg and got an early start the next morning heading for Fort Ross. We had a great time wandering around the fort. The morning fog was just thick enough to hide the highway and nearby modern construction. It didn't take much imagination get an eery feeling of stepping back in time. We continued on down the coast and ended up in Petaluma for lunch and a tour of Mrs Grossman's Sticker Factory. It was actually pretty cool and we walked out with hundreds of sticker samples and scrapbooks to finish at home. We were surprised that Mrs Grossman had expanded her line and now, in addition to craft stickers, printed wine bottle labels for Ironstone, Coppola, etc. We arrived home in the early evening exhausted after our 3-day whirlwind trip through Oregon and down the Oregon Coast.