Days 13 and 14: So many mountains

Dollar Tree was so exciting that Matt and I went back the next day and bought some sunglasses (mine had recently broken), some glow bracelets for Vegas and some batteries. Cheap cheap cheap!

Then we headed further south in to California, through lots of roadworks. Mt Shasta was in our sights for most of the morning, and had a good covering of snow on it:



We stopped over in the town of Mt Shasta for lunch, and remembering my chorus director’s advice, we ate at a diner. I think I got the light option by ordering a chicken burger, because Matt ended up with a plate containing enough food to feed a small family:



I took on the driving after lunch for a couple of hours, on some winding but good quality roads through the mountains. I pulled over after my shift and we swapped, and yet again it was just in time because my god was there a hazard ahead. A good three hours of hazards, actually. There is a major highway from Portland to San Francisco, but because we’d come from one small town and were heading to another, we had to cut across the state diagonally. This meant we passed through shanty towns on tiny horrible roads.

The roads were narrow, bumpy, had chunks missing, were sometimes not even sealed, and I felt a constant fear of death because we were up really high in never-ending mountains and there were lots of blind turns. I was happy to have the GPS, because I could tell Matt which turn was a hairpin and which ones were just normal curves. The arrival time kept ticking up up and up though, which was disappointing, and the glare of the sun on the smeary windscreen added yet another challenge. Eventually, we were rewarded by making it alive to the Best Western in Garberville.

This was a really nice motel. There was a wine and cheese reception in a cute little room overlooking the pool, where I got a variety of cheeses and an enormous glass of a nice chardonnay for FREE! They actually gave up to three glasses to each guest, but one was well enough. Then we sat in the spa for awhile and chatted to a couple of navy guys who were biking up the coast. Room service and some more Law and Order rounded out the pleasant evening.

My reason for choosing Garberville as a stopover was that it’s 7km from the start of the Avenue of the Giants. This ~30km stretch of road winds through groves of giant redwood trees, which average at 600 years old. Some live well over 1000 years and they’re all massive:





We then headed south to San Francisco, and eventually got our first glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge:



That was pretty cool to drive over. They charge a $6 toll but it’s only charged heading inbound, not outbound, which is smart, and it shaves an hour off the trip into town. Really narrow lanes, but a beautiful old bridge. We later found out that it's incredibly rare to not have thick fog on the bridge, so we were pretty lucky!



After checking into the hotel, we went out to dinner and had a look at the shops. Matt got some cool new sunnies and I bought a shirt, and we saw a historic cable car:



We had an early night, to prepare for the big day ahead.