Gold Beach, Oregon - Arcata, California: Introduction to the Redwoods 10th - 13th Oct

October 20, 2007 by Naomi.

After sitting out the windy storm for a day in our most comfortable motel room (with massive king-size bed!), we were very chuffed to come out the following day and find the weather calm and foggy, but not raining! On leaving the motel, we immediately found ourselves cycling behind a friendly family (very unusual on 101), and wondered if this might be a snapshot of us in the future.

After conquering a couple of whopping hills, our appetites naturally grew as they always do and several sources assured us that there were plenty of national parks with picnic tables on this section of the 101. Alas, it was not quite so simple as many of them turned out to be merely viewpoints and the ones with picnic tables were either up or down nasty steep roads (time constraints often mean we cannot go wandering off our designated route for fear of wasting valuable cycling minutes to our anticipated destination) so we ended up sitting on the grass at the top of a cliff in the drizzling rain. A cup of coffee/tea in the afternoon was also elusive in the last Oregonian and strange town of Brookings as all cafes shut at the silly hour of 2, but all was not lost as we did find one open, but hiding down in the harbour.

Just as we crossed the border into California the skies immediately cleared (we paid dearly over the following week, however, for highlighting and revelling in this fact), and we cycled down some of the flattest roads we’d seen in a while across farmlands, admiring the animals and enjoying the sunshine as we went along. Despite its lovely location, however, Crescent City is a most unfortunate place, firstly because it suffered from the same earthquake in 1964 as Alaskan towns such as Valdez (do you remember when we were there? - see entry for Richardson Highway at beginning of August if your memory is failing you) and the resulting tsunamis devasted parts of the town. Secondly, its economy now largely relies on the Pelican Bay Maximum Security Penitentiary just north of town, ie lots of prison guards, police officers and plenty of unsavoury visitors. However, the Thai restaurant (which was unknown to our motel) across the road was excellent.

The following day was a very lucky day indeed, although we really didn’t feel like it as after our wonderful flat jaunt the day before, we were painfully aware that we had two whopping hills to get over, the first of which had no less than three summits. Not only this, on stopping to spend a penny at the side of the road at the viewpoint on the way up, N managed to step in someone else’s pound coin (to put it politely) which made a right mess of her cleats and pedals. Things immediately got better as the road we were climbing was under quite a mighty big job of roadworks. It had three lanes; two going up, and one going down. Two lanes going up usually mean very little shoulder for us hard done by cyclists and some vehicles on the road are very unwilling to share this space. Most reasonable drivers overtake in the outer lane, but there are several nutters whose only aim is to get to their destination as quickly as possible without any regard for anyone else and if this means over-taking a huge vehicle and two cyclists clinging desperately to the side of the road without falling in a ditch or down a steep precipice, creating a dangerous speed sandwich situation, then so be it. On this very lucky day there was only one lane for traffic going both ways, which meant there were lots of flaggers (who were very nice and encouraging to us indeed) stopping and guiding the traffic in both directions on a very windy steep hill, and we basically had our very own cycle lane to the top of the hill! And all this among our first big forest of redwood trees.

After the morning’s excitement and a cold lunch at a very mediocre spot after the descent, we posed for our first photos at the ‘drive-thru’ redwood tree at Klamath although I daresay our measly photos of a couple of bikes were not nearly as impressive as the mighty 4×4 that went ‘thru’ before us!

Our route then took us to the most impressive part of the day’s journey, down Newton B Drury Parkway, an amazing wooded highway with some of the most enormous redwoods to be found; there is even one imaginatively named ‘Big Tree’ which is a mighty 92.6 metres (304ft) tall and at its base 6.6 metres (21.6ft) in diameter. This most exciting day came to an end at the not so impressive town of Orick, which was quite a dump, but the people were very friendly and had an excellent sense of humour: the local theatre advertised ‘Milli Vanilli Live’, a band from the 80s notorious for miming rather than singing. The pie at the local caf was good, too!

It wasn’t too difficult to leave Orick, despite a nasty but somewhat expected bellyache for N. Our route took us through and around various lagoons and some narrow winding roads unfortunately shared with large lorries and massive RVs. An escape was found, however, at Patrick’s Point, a wonderful state park with excellent sea stacks and rocks jutting out into the sea. The weather cleared for some wonderful views over lunch at Wedding Rock. We then made our way to Trinidad and its picturesque lighthouse for more lovely views and even better tea and cake (the latter has become a very regular part of our diet!) The excellent route took us past the expansive Clam Beach where we finally had our first walk in the sand (never time when you’re on a bike!).

Camping in the sand was not on the cards though, so we made our way to Arcata, the second hippy hang-out of the journey where there were plenty more whiffy smells to be encountered by the wandering nose. Lots of entertainment kept us occupied on our day off - bars, bookshops, disgustingly healthy cafes, the absolutely fantastic healthfood supermarket, Wildberries, and even some live punk bluegrass (this is a type of music!), courtesy of Sly Fox helped us enjoy our stay, and all those greens mean we’re not going to suffer from any bouts of scurvy in the near future.

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