Day Trips From Eureka

Yesterday we drove south to the small towns of Ferndale and Loleta, with a side trip to Centerville County Beach. The entire round trip was about 60 miles.

Ferndale is a pretty little Victorian town of about 1300 people, and the whole town is a California Historical Landmark. Main Street is on the National Registry of Historic Places. Here are some pictures I took of the houses and buildings. My excuse for some of these not being well-framed is that I took them while Don was driving and we were going about 25 mph.

We had lunch at the only Mexican restaurant in town, Matias, which isn’t in a Victorian-style building.

The drive to the beach was through sparsely populated rolling hills, with houses of all sizes, ages and (dis)repair, barns, horses, cows, sheep and one broken windmill.

There were nice waves hitting the beach, and only a few people and one horse were there. We didn’t see any gray whales migrating north, although they reportedly do so through the month of May.

A white cross was placed atop a nearby hill in memory of all who lost their lives offshore in an 1860 shipwreck. The ATV road leading up the hill gives access to good spots for watching whales, harbor seals and other wildlife.

On our way back to Eureka, we stopped briefly at the Loleta Cheese Factory.

All cheeses made here are available for sampling, and you can watch through foggy windows to see cheese being made in huge tanks.

Today we drove south again, to the northern end of the Avenue of the Giants, and continued through its 31 miles to the southern end. We returned north via the faster parallel highway US 101. Here are a few of the pics from today.

 

Note the point marked by an ax where an undercut was made in 1908, but curiously, the tree wasn’t felled. Above that a fish marks the high water point during the 1964 flood of approx. 17 feet above the base.

This ancient log is 33 ft. in circumference, and is naturally hollow. It was left over from a harvest sometime between 1850 and 1900, and makes a nice backdrop for pictures.

The road isn’t recommended for big rigs, for obvious reasons. However, logging trucks still use it. Fortunately, traffic was light today.

When we stopped for lunch in Miranda, our timing was bad. The school next door had just dismissed everyone for lunch!

So we drove to the end of the Avenue, got on US 101 and headed north to Scotia, perhaps the last remaining “company town” with houses all built to be the same.

We enjoyed lunch in the pub of the historic Scotia Inn.

The entire round trip was about 180 miles, and we won’t soon forget what it’s like to be surrounded by Giants.