Saturday Oct 27th

We pull out of Carson City and head to Reno to pick up I 80.  We drive past the "biggest little city in America"  which is home to the usual retail outlets as well as some big Casinos and event centers.  We head up, and up.  Again we are out of the desert  and into quintessential California pine country- the Sierra Nevada. Truckee is surrounded by peaks including some ski resorts open for business.  We descend the other side and head down into the Sacramento valley and are clearly into agricultural California.  Many wineries, fruit and nut farms line the highway.   We pass through Colusa and find a paved pull off on CA 20.  With spend the night here with beautiful views of the Golden Hills and the rising almost full moon.
During the night we hear...something... sort of clucking and yipping. The Cruise and Vinny certainly went on alert.  I am researching this to figure out what it was.  We saw lots of gopher-type holes and I saw a smallish rodent-like from a distance.

As we pull out on Sunday we are barely a mile and come across a herd of elk on the hill by the road. We pass into Lake County and it is clear that they have recently experience a pretty substantial brushfire.  We pass by a couple of houses that looked like they had very close calls.  We drive around Clear Lake and pick up 101 north of Ukiah.  We are heading into Redwood country.  It is exciting to see our first redwoods.  And more herds of elk. We cross the Russian and Eel rivers.  Lots of up and downs and hairpin turns and we finally catch our first glimpse of the PACIFIC!   We leave the sun and drive into fog.  We drive through Eureka which was quite spread out and appears to have quite an eclectic population mix. Further up 101 we pass through Arcata, home of Humboldt State.   We find a rest area north of Trinidad, which has an exquisite path bordered by Redwoods and some really big stumps.

The past two days have brought back some vivid California memories for me - in the form of smells. When we were in the valley, the smell of the live oak trees and that wild short grass reminded me of childhood visits to my grandmother's home in Ojai. When we got to the pine forest and redwoods, memories of annual summer visits to Doyle Spring on the Tule River we brought back to me just by inhaling the air.