Oregon to Calif.–sand dunes and redwoods
We crossed the border into Calif. and redwood country and are staying at the Victorian Inn in Ferndale. The only room left. It’s actually a small apartment with kitchenette, bedroom and bathroom bigger than some of the hotel rooms we’ve stayed in this trip. More about all this in a minute.
But first, speaking of kitchenettes, I think we left off with our stay in Oregon House in Yachats (Ya-hots), Ore. I can’t let go of that place without relating a few more details. We stayed in “Willow,” which was the last room left in the area on Saturday night. We paid the $165 so we didn’t have to sleep in the car. Willow just happened to be right on route 101 and apparently looked like the hotel office. We realized this when a couple knocked on the door soon after we arrived and asked if we had a vacancy! I would have happily given the room up to them if there were any other options. And I would have thrown in the “Earth Friendly, vitamin enriched shampoo & body bar” that Oregon House provided instead of the usual basket of shampoo, conditioner, soap, bathing cap, etc.
Turns out OH is really a retreat center where you can arrange massage and healing treatments (not included in the price, however). It offers counseling sessions “in grief and spiritual counseling [often needed after paying the $165 for a night in Willow], energy balancing, prenatal and birth therapy, trauma resolution, craniosacral fluid tide therapy and soul retrieval.” You couldn’t make this stuff up! You can also get some “Crystal Color Light Therapy.” This “combines chromotherapy with the power of quartz crystals.” The device used has seven quartz crystals suspended above a massage table “which align with and correspond to the seven chakras of the human body.” Apparently this process cleanses negative energies and balances them. Fortunately (or maybe not), “you will be fully clothed throughout the session.” All for $25-$45-which is charged on a sliding scale, you decide how much you want to pay. Wish we had had more time to take advantage of all this.
Back on the road south the next morning, we next hit the Oregon Dunes, almost 40 miles of sand dunes, some hundreds of feet tall. We ducked through a hole in a fence behind a strip mall and climbed up one dune to see what people were up to. In the distance we could see kids snow boarding down the giant dunes. Others rode saucers and surfboards. Further down the coast we drove into a recreation area parking lot full of trailers carrying dune buggies and motorcycles. Guys and girls were suiting up and heading out for some serious dune riding. The best though was the guy with a remote controlled miniature dune buggy that he sent careening around the dunes in front of us, spinning and flipping and shooting up rooster tails of sand as it leapt over the dunes. He had packed this thing all the way from Phoenix. Further down the coast we pulled into a scenic overlook. I spotted a whale and some sea lions in a cove below, while Virginia made an 8 x 10 picture of the cove and a roadside memorial that we think commemorated someone who jumped/fell to his/her death at that spot.
On to Brookings, Ore., where we had made a reservation at Southcoast Inn B&B, rolling in there around 8 p.m. Really nice place where we had a tiny but comfortable room on the second floor. The proprietor had grown up in an Air Force family, attended high school at Hahn AB in Germany and was stationed at both Udorn and Ubon airbases in Thailand as an enlisted man. So we had lots in common and plenty to talk about.
After a breakfast of pancakes and fruit, we crossed the border into California and redwood country. We consulted the map and guidebook and then drove along a 12-mile loop through Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park and took pictures of trunks of trees that are hundreds of feet tall. Meandering through the forest was a beautiful emerald colored stream where others swam and sunbathed on a gray sand beach. That brings us back to Ferndale, which hosts the Humboldt County Fair–11 days of horse and mule racing, livestock auctions, and carnival. It’s supposed to be the best preserved Victorian village in California. We’ll let you know tomorrow after we have a chance to check it out.
