Monthly Archives: May 2010
Redwoods and Cat Barf, again…
Since we had a 295 mile trip today, we got an early start and left the Sonoma-Marin fairgrounds in Petaluma about 8:30 am heading initially about 12 miles north to a small Pacific Pride truck stop we had scouted out yesterday.
I wanted to fill up with diesel before we got up into the boonies of the Redwood National Park. And my experience here just reinforced why I don’t like the big truckstops like Flying J, Pilot, TA, etc.. I was in and out in a little over 10 minutes with a 100 gallons of diesel, unlike about a month ago when we left Las Vegas and stopped at a TA truckstop on the outskirts of town. It took me over 40 minutes to get diesel and get back on the road.
About a hundred miles down the road we started encountering our first big redwoods. We had been seeing smaller ones, about 50-60 feet or so, soon after we left Petaluma. But now we were seeing really big ones.
Some of these were over 100 feet high and 8-10 feet in diameter. It’s hard to believe that we’ll be seeing some redwoods here that are over 3 times higher.
Along with the redwoods, we encountered something else, another cat barf situation. It was Mister this time. Don’t know why this has started. Neither cat had a problem with all the curvy roads last year in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, so why now?
Maybe we’ll try not feeding them on travel mornings and see how that works.
About 2 pm we stopped at a Pepper’s Restaurant in Fortuna for lunch. They were located in a shopping center parking lot so we had no problem finding a place to park the rig.
This was unlike two other stops we tried to make today. We first tried to find a place to eat in Leggett, a small town about half way along our trip, but neither of the two restaurants were open. A little while later we drove thru Garberville, a very nice little with a lot of restaurants, all open. But we found no place to pull over and park the rig.
We ate at a Pepper’s in Petaluma last week and liked it, and it was good this time too.
We both had sandwiches that were large enough that we had leftovers to take with us for supper tonight. We also got a piece of coconut cream to split tonight for dessert.
Our road, US 101 was pretty good. It was mostly 4 lane with a smattering of 2 lane, usually thru the mountain curves and steep hills.
We had seen several signs about “Elk Crossing” along our route today, but about 30 minutes before we got to our park, we came across a small herd of elk right along the highway, only about 30 feet away. They didn’t seem to mind, or even take notice when we stopped right beside them.
We pulled into Klamath River RV Park about 4:30 and got set up. The view is certainly better than we’ve had for past week. This is the view our the front of our coach.
And this is the view from out back.
We will be here for 3 nights and plan on leaving Sunday morning. Tomorrow we’re going to take a drive thru the redwoods, and see some of the other sights around here.
More tomorrow…
Redwood Bound…
Today was our last full day in Petaluma. Tomorrow we’ll head about 300 miles north to Klamath, CA to check out the Redwoods in the Redwood National Park.
Jan woke up under the weather today so about 11:30 am I headed out to get my leaking truck tire fixed at the Big O Tires down the street.
Later in the afternoon Jan was feeling better, so about 2:30 pm we headed up the road about 15 miles to Santa Rosa to pick up some magazines at the Barnes & Noble and scout out a place to take on about 90 gallons of diesel on our way north tomorrow morning.. I’ve still got about 60 gallons onboard which is more than enough to get us up to Klamath, but since we will then be in the middle of Redwood National Park, I figure it’ll be better to fill up now.
Coming back we checked out a small truck stop about 12 miles up the road that has enough room for us to get in and out, so we’ll stop there tomorrow morning.
Getting back to Petaluma about 4pm we stopped at the Gourmet Garden for supper. This is a great Chinese buffet that we ate at last week and it was just as good this time.
We got back to the rig a little before 6 pm and I started getting things ready to travel tomorrow.
More then…
