5/16/2009 We Travel the Coastal Road

We had a gorgeous day here today. Blue skies, warm enough, you just wanted to be outside. We decided to travel the Coastal Road this afternoon. A combination dirt/asphalt, single lane road that travels right along the coast.

The beginning of it was just a few miles up the road from our campground.

We pulled over at the first pullout to see what was there. You'll never guess what we found there. New friends! Pauline and Don.

We noticed that their truck tags said Texas so of course we asked if they were real Texans or RV'ing Texans. For those of you new to the blog, we are "Escapees" and lots of RV'ers register their vehicles and get a permanent address in Livingston, Texas through the Escapees organization. Well, it turns out they are RV'ing Texans. We talked with them for about 35 - 40 minutes and then met up with at each pull over along the coast.

This is where the ocean meets the Klamath River. Very foggy today to say the least. Take notice of the little cemetery up on the bluff. There's about 10 graves. We could only read one and the lady was born in 1900 and died in 1979. This has to be a family plot.

As we were standing by the edge of the pullover Bob happened to look down and saw a snake. This is the mama snake who is in protection mode. (BOB took these pictures, not ME)

What is she protective of? Her baby which you can see where the light and the shadow meet, its all curled up.

And why is she protective? Because of this! A lizard who would like nothing more than to get to her baby. This is what Bob tells me. When he said SNAKE I was outta there!

The fog was really thick today.

Its drifting up the river towards our place.

That is one BIG rock! But then everything seems BIG here.

We saw alot of these along the roadway.

It took me awhile to figure out that the bud above turns into this.

Some of the fog even makes it up to the road.

To give some contrast in size, Bob stands between to redwoods. Look how little The Beast looks, like a Matchbox or a Hot Wheels car.

Even the clovers are BIG!

For contrast,,,,a quarter. Huge isn't it?

Another big tree!

We stopped nearby to this redwood that had fallen for whatever reason. Look how thick the bark is.

For contrast, here is Bob holding onto it.

A little further down the road we saw this sign and laughed. They are all big. Or so we thought.

We met up once again with Don and Pauline, the new friends we made earlier in the day.

While standing there in the parking lot this bird landed on our truck. We think it is a Stellar Jay but don't hold me to that.

Anyway, Bob started "talking" to it and the bird kept turning its head side to side, like he was really listening to Bob. At the same time he kept moving towards it. The bird didn't move, just kept "listening".

And Bob kept getting closer....

....and closer.

The bird finally thought he was close enough and took off. It didn't go too far though.

Bob said he wished he had some crackers left, I told him we did and I got a pack. When I opened the paper wrapper on the cheese crackers that bird flew in like the proverbial "bat outta hell". The blue bird landed on the mirror and stayed put until Bob opened the door. The bird had no fear of us at all.

It immediately landed on top of the opened door.

Bob held the cracker up and that's all she wrote.

It came back again for more when it finished that.

Done with the bird we decided to go see what made us stop here in the first place. The sign that said "Big Tree".

It's hard to believe, but we found the biggest tree we've seen so far.

Now is this a tree or what?????

Pretty soon our little blue friend found us.

Close by was this piece of wood on the ground. Isn't the grain beautiful?

A close up.

LaVon, its been a few days, here's a dead tree for you. Its a big one so this should last for a few days.

We watched this car drive through this tree.

So we tried it.

Nope, not gonna happen.

Now this just isn't a tree that happens to have a hole in it. Its called the Tour Thru Tree.

We couldn't drive through it but we could stand in it.

So that was our day, hope you enjoyed it with us.