We awake in a freezing room, again, which is not the most auspicious start to the day. The weather has improved, and whilst it’s not exactly summer-in-Barcelona weather, at least the rain has let up a little. We pack the car up and head into town in search of both breakfast and some additional supplies. First we head to the great retail leveller - Walmart - as I need to get a water bottle for the journey. As an aside, it’s always such an interesting experience to visit a Walmart - perhaps the most highly evolved outcome of a consumerist culture. Shelves and shelves of products, with a variety and scale that dwarves anything else I’ve seen collected in one place. That being said, I still bought my water bottle there, as well as some more snacks, so what do I know?
Next on the agenda is breakfast - we saw a small shed in a parking lot called Java Hut so we stopped for a coffee and, hopefully, a pastry. It’s pretty much just a independent, drive-by coffee shop - a concept that will become more common as we drive on - but they serve a decent latte and we order a banana bread brownie for breakfast. What is handed to us is literally a slab of frosted banana bread the size of a smallish paving stone - it really is ridiculous but it tastes pretty good so we try to ignore the looming weight gain the States tends to enforce on visitors.
We set off for trailhead my companion’s picked out - the Mill Creek Horse Trail - an 18km hike into the Jedediah Smith redwood state park above Crescent City. The track starts climbing almost immediately and we keep moving upwards as the forests becoming more dense and green. There’s a fine mist that occasionally drifts across the trail and gives the whole scene a gently ephemeral character. Bright green ferns line the forest floor, through which is scattered the broken remains of some redwoods and firs, some which block our path and require some mild athleticism to cross. The forests in this part of California were used heavily by George Lucas during the filming of the Endor scenes in Return of the Jedi, something that I see in every corner we turn and rise we climb. I genuinely would not have been surprised to see white-clad Stormtroopers come streaming out of the undergrowth, so familiar is the scenery.
This hike also underlines just how huge the redwoods can get - the scale of them is sometimes hard to perceive when they’re upright, but the trail is littered with the forlorn, decaying carcasses of these fallen giants giving us a different perception of their scale. The uprooted stumps of some of the biggest are larger than a reasonably sized house and I can’t help but think about the noise and chaos that must erupt when they finally topple.
The home takes us just under four hours and by the time we get back to the car, we are happily weary and ready to move north yet again - as we set off, we realise that Crescent City is the last town we’ll see in California, as we cross into Oregon shortly after leaving the city limits. The coast remains spectacular as we drive along, and we stop at a small cove, accessed via a slightly ‘rural’ road, called Whaleshead Beach. The beach itself is pretty tiny, but it gives us an eye-level vantage point to watch the waves thunder into a nearby atoll - it also affords us the opportunity for some pretty heroic photos which I’m sure you’ll see gracing our social media pages pretty shortly.
We are aiming for a small industrial town just a bit further north up the coast, and we roll into Coos Bay around 6PM. Our first priority is dinner, and I’d read about a sandwich shop called Vinny’s Smoking Hot Sandwiches - dear reader, if you ever find yourself in Coos Bay then please go to Vinny’s. From the outside, and the inside frankly, it looks like a sort of abandoned fast food joint - gaudy vinyl signs hang from the outside, the menu is handwritten on random pieces of paper and stuck haphazardly on the walls, the furniture looks like it’s been reclaimed from a hotel lobby, but the food… good heavens the food. Vinny specialises in home smoked meats of all types and the sandwiches we order are the best thing we’ve eaten so far. Whilst we’re eating, a piece of the building falls off and crashes into a window, but we didn’t even stop chewing to look up - that’s how good the food is.
After dinner, we head to a motel and drop our bags off - we’d spotted a small bar, Walt’s Pourhouse, so we went off for a drink to celebrate our hike. Whilst there, we managed to get chatting to a couple of locals, Sam and Tiffany, who give us some great tips on enjoying Oregon and introduce us to the Waltbomb - the bar’s signature tipple. After a fun evening, we head back to get some sleep before heading up into the Oregon mountains.