Found It!!

Archimedes may have shouted out this when discovering that his body mass in his bath caused the water level to increase, a piece of mathematical genius called displacement theory used ever since in a variety of ways but it is difficult to understand why General Vallejo, one of the architects of modern day California, should have chosen Eureka for his state capital located as it is so far to the north of the state.

It may have been that at that time it was a highly busy fishing and logging port with the largest number of Victorian homes outside New England (if you believe the California guidebook).  However today it is almost wholly dependent on tourism for its survival as like much of northern California the fishing and logging industries died long ago.

Often foggy in the morning…

… it soon cleared up

We had chosen it as our base in the far north largely due to its proximity to the even further north Redwood National Park, a place Viv and I wanted to visit.  The drive there up the Pacific Coast Highway, Route 1, to Leggett where the road joined up with 101 was nothing short of spectacular, particularly the change from rugged coastline north of Fort Bragg to winding switchback roads through thick forests that Viv behind the wheel handled most adeptly.  The last 30 miles in particular were very, very windy indeed!

At Leggett we found the ‘World Famous Drive Thru Tree’ – sorry about the spelling! – a 2400 year old Redwood called the Chandelier Tree (see website here) standing 315 feet high which years ago had been hollowed out so that cars could drive thru, I mean through, it.  One of the national park publications I picked up charmingly explained that:

“Carving through a hole through a coastal redwood reflects a time passed when we didn’t fully appreciate the significance of all organisms and their interplay with the environment.”

I don’t disagree that in the past that we’d overdone the exploitation of the environment but really there’s no need to be so preachy about it all the time nor to deny the simple enjoyment of driving through this tree, silly as it sounds (three times in our case!).  The place was packed by the way.

We skirted the Avenue of the Giants, another long stretch of scenic road we planned to drive through on our return (see website here) and soon enough ended up in Eureka where we’d booked a hotel ‘downtown’.  In retrospect this was a mistake as although the guidebooks refer to a ‘vibrant Old Town’, on that Saturday night when we searched for it, it was closed or at least seemed to be. 

However that afternoon we decided to take a look around the sand bar that protected the bay from the ocean and was the reason why the logging companies made Eureka their go to port in this part of the country in the old days.  Nowadays it houses the Coast Guard, Samoa Dunes National Park and the Samoa Cookhouse.

I have mentioned that our progress in California so far had been marked by epicurean behavior in spades so the prospect of dining at one of the few remaining cookhouses in California proved an irresistible prospect for us!

First though we went for a long hike along the dunes and jetty that comprised the national park.  Dating back to the mid-1800’s, a local lady we met with her dogs told us that this was one of the most dangerous ports on the coast and certainly the patch of water between the two jetties heading out into the ocean (not piers and definitely not in the class of Southend’s longest pier in the world!) was very choppy indeed.  We spotted some dolphins heading in towards the harbor which was very exciting.

The river that fed the estuary that created the harbor was a main point for ferrying logs down from the interior (no railway like at Fort Bragg).  In the past, the final mile or so to the waiting logging schooners moored offshore in the tumultuous waves was served by a gravity fed ‘railway’.  Loggers put the logs onto the trucks which free wheeled down to the boats with the trucks being hauled back up to the start point again by horses.  Not much of this now remains.

This lady was a fund of local information too but most dismissive of the local marijuana growers – ‘marijuana millionaires’ she called them.  This is big business up here too along with the tourist industry and keeps mainly the young men in employment.  The problem appears endemic now.

A furry friend

The Cookhouse was a real blast from the past.  All you can eat portions of one dish served family style for $15.95.  That night’s menu was baked ham and fried chicken with all the fixin’s you can imagine! 

Nuthin' Fancy

However that wasn’t why we were there.  We’d stopped at the national park office and a ranger had advised a couple of scenic drives and walks up and down the park.  First was in the very far north in the part of the park called the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.

The start of the Redwood National Forest

Jedediah (great name incidentally) had arrived in California from his native Kentucky with the first group of overland settlers from the east fired by the notion of vast swathes of new fertile land to the far west.  He was a ‘frontiersman’ – i.e. good with a rifle and able to live off the land – and liked it so much he stayed.  That portion of the park is 10 miles away from Crescent City -- the farthest north town in California and one of only two towns, the other being Monterey, susceptible to tsunami’s.  We’d found this out from the people we’d met in Fort Bragg who told us that the tsunami that hammered Japan a few years back also wiped out Crescent City.  We drove back through that city incidentally and it really is flat as a pancake… as well as being pretty small.  Most of the buildings are on the highway these days.

Tsunami survivor in Crescent City

The drive is on Howland Hill Road and is not road marked at all.  We knew because we asked and because we had GPS in the car – great invention by the way.  The best $150 investment you can make in my view. 

What a drive it was!  All on unpaved roads with monster first growth redwoods on both sides of the track.  Wow!!  We stopped at the shorter Stout Grove Trail to get our tree hug for the day and spent an age just sitting there taking it all in.  Spectacular isn’t the word for it.  I cannot think what is.

The next event was the 15 mile long Newton B Dury Scenic Parkway (see website here) running south of Klamath to Elk Prairie, both tiny townships, which was again full of lovely old redwoods but also Roosevelt Elk, the local large critter.  We found loads of them sitting off just grazing peacefully completely oblivious to strange humans snapping away only a few yards away.  Again the herds were split by gender  -- far more females than males.  

The final trail of the day was the Lady Bird Johnson Grove Trail just outside a township called Orick, further south.  We drove 3 miles off the highway to the 1.5 mile trail where we were advised to speak loudly as there were plenty of bears and mountain lions all around.  

Despite this threat of immediate evisceration, Viv and I spent another long period of time with these marvelous, monster trees (yes, more hugging too!) feeling quite a connection by the end (even me).

LBJ’s missus had a keen environmental interest and persuaded her hubby and then his VP, Richard Nixon, as well as then California Governor, Ronald Reagan, to dedicate some land to redwood preservation and this happened in 1969 with more acreage being added occasionally thereafter.  Great idea!

We’d been advised that the small town of Trinidad (named by Spanish sailors who landed on the coast on Trinity Sunday 300 years ago) was both cute and had some nice restaurants so we stopped at Larryman’s Restaurant for dinner.  Our friendly lady on Samoa Dunes had told us this was a nice but expensive place and curiously we found it appeared to be full of those folks she was so disapproving of. 

They could of course have been Silicon Valley millionaires up for the weekend!

What a day though.

The other wine district

Our trip to Napa recently had been lovely but with the departure of the family, we were to be staying at a winery a friend has an interest in located in Sonoma called Deerfield.  We'd drunk the wines before and liked them a lot so this was likely to be great fun.  But to get there we were traveling overland from Marin through the town of San Jose in which was the Charles M Schultz Museum (see website here).

Hands up who doesn't like Snoopy, Charley Brown and the rest?

Not me for sure so there was no way we'd by pass this wonderful opportunity.  However we decided to go on the day of the week it was closed (Aaaagghh!!!) so only had the chance of visiting the gift shop and a small museum there.

But it was worth it.

Schultz himself was a rare kind of guy.  Born and raised in Minnesota like Garrson Keilor who wrote the forward to his first collection of cartoons from 1950-52, Schultz moved first to New York when his cartoons were dropped by the local papers... of course they were snapped up and syndicated country wide which enabled him to move to San Jose where he brought his beloved ice hockey too.  Schultz sponsored the local team and the US Masters Olympics team into the 1970's.  This is why Snoopy and Woodstock play ice hockey.

Snoopy and Charley Brown started day 1 but it took Snoopy 4 years before he first stood up on his hind legs.  Where the Red Baron motif came from is unclear... the suggestion being that the Canadian pilot, Roy Brown, who shot down the Red Baron was somehow connected to Schultz.

Even without the full museum experience, it was wonderful!

The town of Sonoma is south of Snoopy's home and we finally arrived there after most of the museums were closed but still managed quite a bit of a historical tour.

And it is quite something.

Sonoma was first settled in 1823 by the Mexicans (after Spanish independence in 1818, Mexico simply took over) as the Russians were further up the coast in Fort Ross hunting sea otters and other furry creatures and they wanted to check the Russian advance.  The way they did it was by the manner of establishing yet another mission.

The mission

This requires a brief historical retrospective.  Spain was a European backwater after 1600 or so.  They'd managed to kick out the Moors in the 1500's and then almost immediately sailed to the new world in search of expansion (because none was available in Europe) and more importantly gold, silver and other loot.  They found it and it financed all of Charles V's European ventures throughout the rest of the 16th century.  However transporting it meant outwitting pirates and privateers such as Sir Francis Drake, something they were pretty poor at.

Spain centralized power in the new world in various locations, the most northerly being Mexico City from where they administered the territories in present day USA.  They had 3 routes north: one into Texas, one through Arizona and New Mexico and the third up the west coast by the establishment of missions starting in Baja (or lower) California heading up into Alta (or upper) California.  The route these missions traveled was along El Camino Real (or the King's Highway) with the missions being set 1 day's travel apart.

The hotel across the road from the Mission

The intent of these missions was that they would be the mechanism for expansion and assimilation of the territories.  Spain hadn't the men and wherewithal to impose control by force or by other means so simply sent in the holy men.  First were the Jesuits, then the Franciscans and finally the Dominicans.  The missions were to last 10 years by which time they would be 'secularized' (or dismantled) and the township (or pueblo) that had sprung up around it would take over as the new colony.  The mission itself would then revert to being the parish church.

In practice this didn't happen at all.  The system began in the early 1700's and it wasn't until the 1840's that they were disbanded, presumably under duress as that was the time the upstart US colonists were pushing back against their Mexican overlords.  In Sonoma, 30 of these 'frontiersmen' (as US history currently refers to them) went up to the front door of the then governor, General Vallejo, and 'arrested' him.  In reality, he knew them all and invited them in for drinks and dinner.

Whatever the real story, these men wrote a declaration of independence, created the California bear flag and started to worry what an annoyed Mexico would do to them.  Fortunately 6 weeks later a US detachment arrived and raised the stars and stripes and promptly declared war on Mexico.

The original bear flag.  Vallejo never liked it.  He thought it looked more like a pig.

The war lasted only a short time and Alta California or the Republic of California as it then became, joined the union.  General Vallejo became the first elected representative of the state and the legislature offered him the chance of having the state capital named after him.  Vallejo first suggested Eureka and then the town bearing his name, however neither were acceptable so Sacramento it was.

Immediately after the gold rush began in 1848 and Sonoma became the main winter quarters for the miners in them thar hills.  However this didn't last long as steam powered river boats were soon introduced enabling resupply from San Francisco up the Sacramento river.  This finished Sonoma.

Or it did for a while anyway as Vallejo had begun to plant grapes.  He first took those from the mission and then planted thousands more.  At the same time a colorful Hungarian Count Haraszthy arrived from south of San Francisco and declared that the terroire and weather in Sonoma was better for grapes than anywhere else in the world.  Despite being accused of embezzling from the California Mint (where he had acted as Treasurer and Controller) he bought up land and planted thousands of acres of grapes imported from Europe.

His winery was called Buena Vista and was the first winery to plant the zinfandel grape, a grape from Croatia incidentally and not France or Italy.

The count and Vallejo were friendly with their children inter-marrying and the industry became the lifeblood of Sonoma.  The count came to a sticky end as while looking to establish a rum plantation in Guatemala, he fell into a crocodile infested river and was never heard of again!

Vallejo's home in Sonoma

However in the 1870's a massive recession hit the US at the same time as the phylloxera bacteria ate its way through Sonoma's grape vines (and incidentally General Vallejo and the Count's fortunes).  Disaster again and Sonoma entered a lengthy sleepy phase again.

Wine was its saviour again and over time nearly 400 wineries have sprung up to tap into the perfect climate Count predicted would produce the best wines in the world.

Where Napa is new and glitzy, Sonoma has charm and elegance and an old world feel to it.  I like it.