Siobhan drove us into a tree...

More on that later.  We left our lodgings in San Francisco reasonably early this morning.  By that, I mean before 9am.  We don't seem to get up as early as we used to any more.  While we knew that we had a long drive ahead of us, the start of the drive was going to include going over the Golden Gate bridge.  It was neat - it is an engineering masterpiece.  Very impressive.


Next stop was Sausalito, which is a quaint little town across the San Francisco Bay.  It has great views back across the Bay, and if you head to Fred's place, he cooks a mean breakfast.  Neither of us could finish it, but it was very yummy.  Sated, we headed back on the 101 towards Healdsburg.  You might ask what is in Healdsburg, and the answer would be the Bear Republic Brewing Company.

 Another of the really nice brews that we get at Hashigo Zake is the Big Bear Black Stout, so as we were passing anyway, it would have been rude not to stop in for one.  After that, we even managed to find a cafe that made coffee pretty close to some of the better stuff in Wellington.  It was at the Flying Goat Cafe.  Flying pigs and good coffee seem more likely to go hand in hand over here, but the Flying Goat was the goods.

As I'd had a beer, it was Siobhan's turn to drive.  We were probably about half an hour further down the road when we saw a sign that made Siobhan drive us into a tree.  Here is the evidence.  You will note that she is in the driver's seat.

Luckily, after Siobhan had driven us into a tree, she drove us safely out the other side too.  These are the sorts of amusing sideshows that you need when you are on the road for about 9 hours in total (including breaks).

The scenery on the trip was just incredible.  Having travelled up the coast when we headed north from LA, today was mostly spent travelling inland through massive redwood forests.  While we saw some truly huge redwoods at Yosemite, the ones we saw today weren't that much smaller and they were right up to the edge of the road. The size and scale of everything that we are seeing is still difficult to comprehend.

We arrived at our destination of Crescent City about 6.30pm.  According to the sign at the city limits, Crescent City has a population of just over 8,000 people, so they seem to be taking a bit of licence with the "city" word.  Apparently Crescent City copped a bit of the fall-out from the tsunami that devastated Japan about a year ago.  We went to a Thai place for dinner, and the woman was explaining that the tsunami had washed up logs into the parking lot of the place.

Dinner was an interesting experience as they had had some atrocious weather here over the weekend.  A number of the houses had been without power, but the centre of town had power.  This meant that the locals came into town and pretty much ate the restaurants out of food.  However, instead of telling us what they had left, we played an entertaining game of "guess what ingredients we have in the kitchen".  My starter for 10 points was "beer".  That got a "no".  I then tried a soft drink, mountain dew.  I thought that I had the waiter with that one, but he returned triumphant declaring that they had none of that either.  We then tried ordering food.  Siobhan went for "beef" something as it is normally hard to get food poisoning from that, but they were all out of that too.  At this point, all we had succeeded in ordering was two glasses of water.  The waiter assured us that they had water but it took ages for it to arrive.  Siobhan was at the point of leaving (and it was getting pretty silly - it seemed like something from Monty Python or Fawlty Towers) when we finally settled on something with chicken.  The surprises continued, as dinner was really nice.  And the staff were very friendly and apologetic, so overall it wasn't too bad.  Well, we have another long day on the road tomorrow as we drive to Portland, the micro-brewery capital of America or the World or something.