The Trip – Part 15: Napa Valley and back to the Coast
Heading west again, there was one other place we wanted to visit before returning to the Pacific Ocean: Napa Valley. We camped in Bothe-Napa Valley State Park for a weekend and had a wonderful time driving to wineries all day and sampling as many varieties as we could. We learned to start with the dry wines and work our way up to the sweets. At mid-day we stopped and made our usual lunch of peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches washed down with reconstituted powder milk (definitely an acquired taste). Then we continued our tour in the afternoon. We visited places like Charles Krug, Beringer Brothers, Christian Brothers, Sterling Vineyards, and others that I can’t recall because they were not captured in photos.
At the end of the day we headed back to the campground to rest, eat dinner, and then fall asleep. When you consider that the weather was nice and the park had showers, what more could a couple of itinerant campers ask for?
After a wonderful, wine-filled weekend we angled our way northwest, finally reaching Highway 1 again just south of Mendocino, where we set up camp in Van Damme State Park. This was a nice park with a wooded campground in the Little River Canyon. In addition to ferns and Redwood trees, there is a pygmy forest where you can hike among cypress and pine trees that are only 6 inches to a few feet tall. The beach was a source of tide pools where we enjoyed looking for some of the strange, exotic sea life that you don’t find in the Midwest, like starfish, sea anemone, and many things that remained nameless.
Continuing north from Van Damme State Park, we finally reached the end of Highway 1. It terminates where it connects with Highway 101 near Leggett, California. We followed 101 to our next stop, Patrick’s Point State Park. This was a great park, with long stretches of sandy beaches covered with driftwood and backed up against tree-covered cliffs. There were many wonderful trails to hike. It was interesting to see trees with their roots sticking out in weird shapes. This was the result of small trees that began their life on the trunks of their fallen predecessors. Their roots grew down around the sides of these “nursery” trees. Decades later the living tree would be large and the dead log would be rotted away, leaving the roots of the new tree surrounding its former location. This was a very nice place to camp.
After having spent most of the early part of our trip visiting National Parks, it was interesting to be staying in state parks. Most of the campers in these parks were locals. At some of the campground programs that we attended the Ranger would ask where people were from. Most named nearby towns or a neighboring state, so when we said Madison, Wisconsin, that often brought comments or questions.
It was finally time to pack up our tent again and continue north. Our next stop would be in Oregon. We first arrived in California in mid-December and it was now mid-April. We celebrated our 3rd Anniversary (April 3, 1974) in Yosemite National Park, but we didn’t get around to taking our “Anniversary” picture until we were in Patrick’s Point State Park.
It had taken us 4 months to travel almost the entire California coast as well as visit Yosemite, Sequoia, and other beautiful inland sites.