Northern California Coast - June 29th & 30th

After the Redwood National Park we headed south towards San Francisco, via the winding coastal highway rather than the freeway – the road winds its way along the coast via a few different towns, with great views along the way. It’s only about 10 miles longer than the same trip on the freeway, but takes about 10 hours from Redwoods NP I think) compared to 5 hours on the freeway. But very much worth it!

No board and perfect peeling waves...

Here in California we discovered… Australia! There are gum trees everywhere!! Only one type, apparently, introduced from Australia for use with furniture etc, but still! Seeing as the northern California coast was much (MUCH) dryer than the parts we’d been through so far, with dry grasslands and gum trees instead of pine forests, it really looked like Australia, and was hard to believe we weren’t travelling on a road back home!

We saw quite a few sandy beaches with bright blue water (such a nice day!), although didn’t except quite so many to have light greyish sand rather than white – but there were lots of those too. We saw lots of ospreys flying high over the coast, and the splash of a whale way down below, but we mainly just drove and took photos out of the window, so we could make it to Bodega Bay to stay the night – along the coast about 2 hours from San Francisco. However… in line with our current theme of rocking up to a town and hoping to find somewhere to stay when we get there, thanks to our trusty campground book that we bought (with great difficulty!) – it was the July 4^th long weekend, and there were people EVERYWHERE, especially along the coast enjoying the hot and sunny weather… So we rang around lots of places closer to San Fran and thankfully found somewhere to stay, much closer to the city – this way we could get to the Sunday meeting in the city the next day, which was nice J