August 9, 2017
Day 37 Crescent City, CA: Putzing Around in Crescent City
Today was a day to get a few things done. Boring things like laundry and grocery shopping. But before doing any of that, we decided to head up into the hills to see the Redwoods for real for the first time. The Jedediah Smith Redwood Forest is the first of several parks going down into California. At the top end, just outside of Crescent City is a little route that you can take to get into the forest. We stopped by the Redwoods Information Centre to find out any more info that Katie had not given us, but she pretty much had it all covered. We asked the fellow there about this little treck and his comment was “well, it starts with a short, steep hill then the road becomes gravel and since there’s been no rain since May, its pretty dusty up there”. Hmmm…. sounds…interesting? We decided to give it a try. After all, we were riding unloaded – how hard could it be?
Ha! At this point you are laughing, saying to yourself, you know what comes next and you are right! We got to the start of the hill and it was steep, but we kept going. Up, up, up we went, stopping from time to time to catch our breath, until we reached the gravel road. Up we went some more, but our hearts just weren’t in it this morning. The road was actually a lot busier than we thought it would be, with cars coming up and down at a regular pace, making it difficult for us on the narrow, twisty track. We got far enough up to feel the silence of the forest (when there weren’t any cars) and take a quick couple of pics, then decided to pack it in and head back down. It was disappointing for me and a little disturbing as I know that tomorrow we have a 1200 foot climb to make and I wondered if I had it in me. It helped later in the day to find that this very short steep section was 500 feet! Gosh!!! No wonder it was so hard!!
We came back to our little home away from home, gathered up the laundry and headed off to get this chore done. We have been lucky to have had laundry facilities at the motels we have stayed at and the cost there was $.75 per load – not too bad. We were gobsmacked to arrive at the Laundromat to find that each load would cost us $3.50!!! Yikes!! With two loads to do, this made a pretty big dent in our Cary Quarters!
As the laundry was drying, we went to a nearby grocery store to pick up a few items for dinner and tomorrow. Jim was looking for some WD-40 to use for cleaning the chains, so we stopped at the Starbucks from yesterday and he walked to the Home Depot next door to get that. On our way, we had our first real incident since Jim’s fall at the beginning of the Centennial Trail in Washington. As I was hopping back up on my bike, my mirror was facing down and I managed to gouge my knee on it! Wounded warrior that I am, I kept a brave face and went in to order my latte anyways – see how tough I am? Lol!
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Coming back to our little place, we worked on the journal and videos for the remainder of the afternoon before making our dinner.
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The plan is to turn in early (if possible, there seem to be a lot of happenings around here in the evening) and get up early to tackle the hill (as long as it doesn’t rain). Hope we sleep well!
Today's ride: 18 km (11 miles)
Total: 1,391 km (864 miles)
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