Anchor Bay , Mendocino County

  Anchor Bay, California, United States
Sunday, June 19, 2005

After a 3 hour drive up the west coast we arrived at Anchor Bay, a tiny blink and you'll miss it, a one road town where Rob and Mary have their second home. The drive is along highway 1; although it sounds like a major road it's actually a single lane windy road that follows the coast with sheer cliff drops around every bend. I took over driving half way and managed to scare Kelly successfully quite a few times. We are spending five days here before we start off on our own. It was 96 degrees on the way up, thank god for aircon.

The first full day here (Tuesday), we all set about cutting the grass around the house, cottage, boat house and meadow, which was quite hard work until I got hold of Rob's tractor, boys and their toys!!!!
The tractor is great fun, it made light work of the long grass and we will be using it to split logs in a few days.


After our hard work we settled down for dinner then a glass of wine out on the deck and a dip in the wood burning hot-tub. In fact everything here is wood burning. Rob and Kelly are pyromaniacs so we had about 4 fires going at once.


Here is a classic "only in America": What do you get if you cross a cauliflower with broccoli....?



Yes you've guessed it Broccoflower!!!!! Good old GM crops. So we had to buy it and made Broccoflower Baji.

We took it easy the next day as my whole body was aching. Manual labour, it's been a long time!!!!!

The next two days it rained quite hard while England basked in glorious sunshine (typical), so we stayed in watched movies and planned our first stop.

Saturday we took a trip up the coast to Mendocino and Fort Brag. Mendocino was where Murder She Wrote was filmed but there was no sign of Angela anywhere!

After we got back we had a trial run of setting up the tent, it is HUGE. It fits to the back of the truck and stands about 8ft tall. We will post some pics next time.

We have adopted a mascot for the trip called Jack who we will take around the world with us.

As most of you know, Chris is full of useless information so we thought it would be appropriate to share a golden nugget of knowledge with you so not to forget how annoying he can be. This will be known as Jack's fact file and we will be testing you on our return!!!

Jack's Fact #1 - Kangaroos can't walk backwards!!! Interesting!!

We leave tomorrow to begin the 9 week road trip around the west coast, Canada and down to Las Vegas. Our first stop is Eureka, Redwood Country, so we will update in around a week when we should be deep into Oregon.