Willits, California

October 10 and 11

Next stop:  Willits, a small northern California town barely off US 101 and 30 miles from the coast. We stayed at the Golden Rule RV Park south of town, which is owned by a nondenominatinal Christian church.  The campground was small, wooded, pretty, and very much out in the boonies. We liked it.

There were two newspaper boxes near the office so we bought our first hard copy newspapers in a while. The weekly, called the “The Willits News," had a front page article about a local museum exhibit called “Out of the Ashes,” commemorating the one year anniversary of wildfires that heavily damaged Mendocino and five other northern California counties in October 2017. That museum was in Willits so we made a visit.

This tiny road took us down a hill from US 101 to the Golden Rule Campground, where we stayed for two nights.  

We drove by this sign on our way to the campground. Ridgewood Ranch is where legendary race horse Seabiscuit trained, recuperated from a ruptured ligament he suffered in a race, and lived out his retirement.   When Seabiscuit retired in 1940, he was horse racing's all time leading money winner. The RV park where we stayed was once part of Ridgewood Ranch.

Our campsite site at the Golden Rule RV park. 

In the center of town is the "Willits Arch." Parts of the arch once stood in Reno, Neva, which donated it to Willits and got a new one. The town is named for a settler who arrived in 1857.

After the terrible fire last year, a Ukiah, CA, artist held a mosiac workshop for fire survivors.  Many of the "Out of the Ashes" items we saw were amazing creations made out of broken glass, melted metal, and other charred or melted objects from homes. The exhibit was at the Mendocino County Museum in Willits.

Jim looking at a display about nearby Buddhist retreat that was damaged in the October 2017 fire.

Another "Out of the Ashes" mosaic.

This statue of Seabiscuit, his owner Charles Howard, and a physician stands at the Frank Howard Hospital in Willits.  Frank's father, Charles Howard, was a benefactor of the hospital.  It was named after his 15-year-old son who died in a truck accident in 1926 at the family's nearby Ridgewood Ranch.  Howard was an auto magnet and owner of thoroughbred horses, included Seabiscuit.

Fortuna and Ferndale, California

October 8 and 9

We spent two nights at Riverwalk RV Park in Fortuna, California.  It was a short walk across a road to the Eel River, which empties into the Pacific Ocean just nine miles to the west.  

Most of our local exploring, however, was done in the nearby smaller town of Ferndale. The the entire town is registered as a California historical landmark with dozens of well preserved Victorian-style homes and business. It's also the site of what we read is the only cattle cemetery in the US. We had to see that.

The Eel River,  as seen from a two mile walking path just across a road from our Fortuna, CA, campground.  The Eel River is 196 miles long; along with its tributaries is the third largest watershed entirely in California. I read that the city was named when early settlers saw the nearby forests and the river and felt "fortunate" to live there.  

Above are just a few of the intricately painted and gingerbread-detailed homes and business in tiny (population 1300) Ferndale, California. Some of the buildings are known as "butterfat palaces" because they were built with wealth from the local dairy industry.

Jim at Ferndale's Champion Cow Cemetery.  It's at the local fairgrounds and the entire "cemetery" consists of three grave markers for Jersey cows.  Sunny King Berna was a world butterfat champion; Silken Lady Ruby of Ferndale was a Lifetime Butterfat Champion; and Challengers Joyce VG was a national Jersey milk champion.  All were owned by Ferndale dairy farmers.

And then we stumbled across the Historic Ferndale Cemetery, which climbs a hill near downtown. 

The Cemetery also has a wonderful view of the the city of Ferndale.  Ferndale is 260 miles from San Francisco but 40 structures were damaged by that 1906 quake and almost all of the cities chimneys fell to the ground.

In Northern California Near Crescent City

October 6 and 7

We are at a beautiful northern California RV campground called Redwood RV Resort, and parked among huge trees.   

Our first night we got settled in and wandered around the park with our dogs.  The second day we drove to the Hiouchi visitors center of the Redwood National and California State Parks, which have established a cooperative management effort. Together they manage one national and three northern California state parks covering 105,516 acres. Per the park brochure, those parks have 36 percent of the old growth redwood forests.

Jim asked the rangers for a recommendation of where we could hike with our dogs.  A very enthusiastic ranger gave us advice about that, recommended a scenic bypass on our way to our next stop, and even recommended a GPS system made especially for RVs (it’s called Garmin 769 RV, he said.)

When we got to the trail, however, a sign said “No Dogs.”  We weren't sure if the sign was old, or if in the ranger's enthusiasm to describe a favorite hike he didn’t hear the word "dog."

So we went with the first and kept the dogs on literal short leashes. In retrospect and after some research, it was a no dogs hike.  We try to be responsible dog owners, so our apologies to the beautiful trail. We will not do that again. But as usual, we packed out all dog "by products."

Later we drove into Crescent City, about eight miles north of our campground, to get some groceries. I read online that Crescent City is susceptible to tsunamis and that a large part of the city was destroyed by a tsunamis caused by the 1964 earthquake near Anchorage. in 2011 the city's harbor was damaged by tsunamis after the 2011 earthquake near Sendai, Japan.Thirty-one tsunamis have hit Crescent City since 1933.

One of our first views (this trip) of the Pacific Ocean as we drove from Coos Bay, OR toward Crescent City, CA. It's a typical Oregon coast scene:  pretty beaches and big rocks.

Our RV site at Redwoods RV Resort.  Jim saw a light peaking though the trees and thought it was some sort of streetlight -- until he realized it was a sliver of sunlight beaming through the heavy tree canopy.  We are not getting a lot of natural light in this spot.

Bev and Maddie on the four-mile out and back Hiouchi Trail at Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.  The tree we are standing in front has a hole near the bottom that we walked through.

Jim and Arlo admiring a stand of redwoods.  Per our park brochure, some of the redwoods along the Pacific coast are 2,000 years old.

At our campground: A fallen redwood becomes a "nurse log," providing water and nutrients to a seedling that sprouted on top of it. Now that seedling is another very big tree. 

A few redwood pinecones Bev picked up in the campground. So tiny.  

Coos Bay

I'm many days and one state behind on the blog, so I'm going to start adding dates.  That way when I look at the blog in the future, I'll know when we were actually at a certain place. And so will you.

October 4 and 5

From Corvallis we drove to the Oregon Coast town of Florence, turned left and started down Highway 101 South. We traveled parts of it before and it's beautiful. But it's also curvy, bumpy, and something we just might not do again in the motorhome. 

First stop was Coos Bay, Oregon, the largest city on the Oregon coast with around 16,000 people. 

Our tow car battery was dead again when we got to our RV Park.  I called AAA for the second time this trip; the customer service rep (who later told me he was in Arizona)  thought "Coos Bay" was a pretty weird name. Originally known as Marshfield, the city gets it name from the Coos Indians, one of several area tribes.

Coos Bay looked a little economically depressed to us.  Maybe it was the fact that it rained pretty much constantly the one full day we were there.  Or maybe it was because we were just off a very active week with family and in Corvallis, and needed a "down time" stop. Sorry, Coos Bay. We probably gave you short shrift.

The McCollouch Memorial Bridge spans the bay on the north side of the city of Coos Bay. It was built in 1936 and is named for Conde McCullough who designed (or helped design) this bridge and ten others on Oregon's section of US Highway 101 -- plus over 600 others. The bridge above is on the National Register of Historic Places and is 5,305 feet long.

Some ships seen in downtown Coos Bay.  Coos Bay was historically a ship building and lumber center. But per the web, forest products (isn't that lumber?) tourism, fishing and agriculture now dominate the Coos County economy.

Corvallis, Oregon

Next stop was Corvallis, Oregon, home of Oregon State University where Jim got his degree in forestry -- plus most of his hoodies and many of his baseball caps.

We stayed at the Benton Oaks RV Park at the Benton County Fairgrounds in Corvallis. I wished I had taken photos of the campground.  While the sites themselves weren't anything special, the setting was pretty darn nice for a fairgrounds campground, with a huge grove of big oaks in the middle.

I kept thinking "why do they call it 'Benton' Oaks?"  Turns out to be the most logical of answers: Benton is the name of the county.  Thomas Hart Benton served as a US senator from Missouri 1821-1851 and advocated for westward expansion of the US, including control over the territory that is now the state of Oregon.

We walked and drove all over Corvallis and the campus and took the dogs to two dog parks.  We had lunch at a McMenamins, a local chain that buys historic buildings, restores them, and turn them into pubs, hotels, and breweries.  And Jim stocked up on his Oregon State gear.

Oregon state has an experimental turf field next to our Corvallis campground. They also had master gardener plots still in bloom.

Oregon State won the most recent college baseball championship, held last summer in Omaha.

Oregon State's mascot is the beaver and there are beavers galore on campus.  This guy is a door knob at the student union...

...And this guy -- named Bennie -- posed with Jim in the student union.

The Oregon State University campus. With 28,000 students its the largest university in Oregon.

Maddie, Arlo and Jim at one of the two dog parks we visited. This one was not fenced so we kept the dogs on leash - both of then are too prone to run off, usually with Maddie in the lead and Arlo willingly joining in.

Jim found one of the apartments he lived in while going to Oregon State in 1973-74 and is standing in from of his former home.  They were new at the time and Jim said they were especially nice for a guy who had recently gotten out of the Navy.  He loved that the door of this one opens to a woods. They still look nice.

As seen in downtown Corvallis:  No bikes and ... no large pickles?  Tubular vegetables?  Blimps?  The list is endless, although it's probably skateboards.