Friday/Saturday/Sunday

[ocelot]

Friday night at about 11PM, koyote and I set off for Redding. Being the middle of the night, this was a rather uninteresting portion of the trip. We got into Redding at about 1:30AM or so, found a cheap hotel with poor air conditioning and no shampoo, and fell asleep.

The next morning, we woke up, got caffinated, and set off for Arcata. This was only about a 120 mile drive, so we figured it wouldn't take too long. What we didn't know was that all but about 10 miles of it was windy mountain roads. So the drive took longer than expected, especially since the car overheated several times.

In Arcata, we ended up parking across the street from a neighborhood garage sale, where I found the twin to this stuffed koala my grandparents gave me when I was really little (oops, just realized that I forgot to mention it in my letter to them!).

Arcata seems to be a very nice town. It's a beautiful area, near the coast, but surrounded by mountains covered with redwood trees. The weather is moderate. While we were there, it was rather cool. We were told that this was unseasonably cool weather, but that it didn't get all that much warmer or colder either. The air quality was a very nice change - even I could feel a difference in my ability to breathe, and there's nothing wrong with my lungs.

It's a hippy town (which is unsurprising, given Humboldt County's reputation as pot capital of the US), and seems pretty friendly. Some people in stores seemed a bit standoffish - I suspect it was the whole tourist thing. There were an ungodly amount of VW vans around.

We realized that driving home that night, as we'd intended before discovering the long winding road, would be rather difficult, so we asked a friend to feed the cats and bought some fresh socks and underwear from a mall in Eureka.

We spent the night at a motel (which also didn't have shampoo, and had a rather overeffective air conditioner) in the middle of redwood forested nowhere, after getting extremely overpriced dinners at the restaraunt next door that we were too tired to eat more than half of. We had to throw them out, since the hotel didn't have refrigerators in the room. I'm still annoyed about this.

The motel was the One Log Chapel Inn, which didn't make a whole lot of sense until morning, when we went outside and discovered that the storage-shed looking place in the courtyard was, in fact, a little chapel made out of a redwood tree trunk.

The first part of the drive back to Davis, through the redwoods, was nice. Then we got further inland, and it got Hot. The car has no air conditioning, and by the time we stopped for lunch, I was starting to feel bad. We stopped at this lake camping resort place, which bugged the hell out of me for some unknown reason. Perhaps just because I was hot, and the lake looked really nice, but we couldn't go swimming due to lack of swimsuits. But that's not the whole thing - the whole feel of the place was just wrong.

Later in the afternoon, I think I was actually heat sick - I almost cried when we stopped at a gas station and it didn't have air conditioning (I can't imagine the guys working there were much happier about that...). A frosty at Wendy's helped though.

And then we were back in Davis, and discovered that my apartment complex had chosen that weekend to drain and resurface the pool. Meanies.