2003-07-23 11:26 p.m.
A Grove of Redwoods, A Shuffle of Volvos
TheBoy and I took a little drive last weekend up to the redwood country. Before doing such a thing, it's generally a good idea to check and make sure there isn't a Harley convention going on that's got every hotel room for miles booked up. (And campgrounds, too, though in my world that's pretty moot. I'm too much a slave to my own comfort to camp. My idea of roughing it is going without cable.)
Still, after finding a suitable hotel room in Canada, we had a blast. Some travel pointers:
- If you ever want to go look at big trees, a convertible is a huge bonus. I drove up the Avenue of the Giants while TheBoy leaned the seat back and gawped, then he returned the favor.
- Highway 101 is your Western US headquarters for kitschy tourist attractions. If you were disappointed by the tourist traps in the Grand Canyon, come here.
- Hippies and right-wingers can and do happily coexist out in the boondocks, because they're all desperate to get away from an evil, corrupting society. The result is something like a Christian Renaissance Fair, though. ("Elfin Glen" was right next door to "Carvings for Christ," and yet they did not implode from mutual improbability.)
- A group of redwood trees is a grove. A group of Volvos is a shuffle.
- Drive-thru trees (note: drive-thru, never drive-through) are fun, especially when you drive through them three or four times to properly capture the experience photographically. (Or try to. When I get giddy with the cheesy tourist trap love, my pictures get sloppy.) And I scored a sweet floaty pen of a tiny car driving through a tiny tree. It's now my third favorite, after the "Jesus Walks on Water" pen and the one where a puff of fog floats through the Golden Gate.
- Highway 1 from Jenner all the way up to Leggett is one smooooth, twisty stretch of pavement, just begging for a zippy little car with good suspension to zoom up it.