Ebb Tide Lodge Fort Bragg

Peace out Santa Rosa... Maybe we'll meet again.<br> <br>After two nights at Claire's Rob and I packed up the car for the last time in Sonoma County.<br><br>Started off our day with breakfast with Claire and Flick. Piner Cafe.. Wish I met you earlier. After I stuffed my face with french toast for the second day in a row. Rob opted for the pancakes. Never in my life have I ever seen a pancake so big. Seriiously it had a 14 inch diameter and was about 2 ...

... my goat: Trying to get my laptop to connect to any wireless network. Seriously &#8211; having free wifi in the room is great but of my pesky laptop will not connect to it - it may as well cost a million quid.<br><br>What I listened to: Sirius Radio station 22. The same DJ (poor fella pulled a long shift) was spinning up &#8216;classic alternative&#8217; music all day. I have never got the tag of alternative that is used over here ...

... all over town, sitting on the beach and poring over maps.<br>Lovely time. Lovely sunny day in the high 60s. There are charming shops and a super, raw foods cafe I ate lunch at Living Light Cuisine. Sadly the library was closed, in fact due to budget constraints it only opens 4 days a week now. <br>I feel ready to take on the mountains again.

... scene.<br>The road was pretty quiet from there on, winding thru more redwoods and I almost took the Newton Drury Parkway from yesterday's wonderful ride, but I wanted to make some semblance of time. The temperature when I started was 58F and gradually climbed to 66-68 until I finished climbing and got into regular forested mountain land. I noticed it was getting into the high 70s and figured I ...

... of stop and go for 20 miles. As we got closer to the Golden Gate bridge so did the fog as we crossed the bridge it was barely visible due to the heavy fog just our luck! We then attempted to go in the view point on the north side of the bridge only to find it filled with people just like us and no parking was available so we continued on our journey to Ft Bragg. In our planning we thought it would be great to travel up the ...

After three weeks on the road, I'm finally taking some time to<br>figure out Travelpod. It's really a pretty simple site if you start out<br>right and update each day. I've added several locations from the period<br>7/18 through 7/22 in order to update the map so that it's not a<br>straight bee-line from Astoria, OR to Venice, CA. There are ...

... blow hole.<br><br>We drove north of Fort Bragg looking for a winery that the Glendeven Innkeeper had recommended. It was farther away than we thought, but we finally found it a few minutes after we started talking about turning around and going back. The view from the winery right on the coast was beautiful. The man working at the winery was less than friendly ...

... of folk telling them 'don't do that it might harm you'.  Instead the message was 'do what you like as long as you don't harm others and you might enjoy life more and evolve into the spiritual being you are'. The owners of Black Oak Ranch have been working since the 70's to help the Native Americans gain rights as human beings which since Columbus they haven't had.  Recently they gained some ground on this with the UN, however the Vatican has yet to rescind the edict they passed ...

... flat farm country and orchard areas- really similar to what we would drive through at home, except for the Palm trees! Shortly after this we began an uphill climb that took us through a series of small communities on a large lake called Clear Lake. The towns of Lucerne and Nice were beautiful and seeing all the homes built so high in the mountains was really quite incredible. For the most part, the speed ...

... and it was lovely. We met a kid who was looking for glass on the beach - apparently the sea acted as the town rubbish tip for many years and all that it left is many small pieces of glass that have been worn down by the action of the sea. We drove into town in the evening to get a pizza - it was extra yummy and we made the best of our small room. Here's the view of the sunset looking out over the Pacific from our hotel: