Day 4, Manchester Beach, CA

After a totally restful night in a real bed in a real house with real walls and real toilets, we started our day with a meeting of the minds. We were supposed to spend two days at Prairie Creek, but it was still dumping rain. It was dumping to the point that there was no way we were going to be able to hike or see any of the giant trees we had come so far to see. Honestly though, the kids weren’t upset in the slightest. Trees, schmeeze… they didn’t care. So we decided to get a refund on our campsite and move along to Manchester Beach.

It has been proven by four out of five tourists to be hazardous to your health to travel on an empty stomach, so we started our journey with a breakfast in Orick at the Palm Inn. Nice little country café with the most polite staff on the planet. They were so sweet and had stayed late the night before and fed us dinner, so we went back for breakfast. Same cook, same waitress. Do these people ever sleep??

Highway 101 had been the road less traveled, so we started with that for the day. I have to tell you though, I was quite the pain about missing the trees. You could see quite a few from the road, but there were those bigguns somewhere in the woods, and I didn’t get to see them. I was so ticked that I had started to make plans in my noggin for another trip just to see the trees in a couple of years. Honestly, I was a bear. A cranky, crabby, pouty bear with no buffet.


Then we spotted the Avenue of the Giants!! A long and not-too-windy road that meanders through the real giants of the redwoods. There is very little brush growing in these groves, so hiking is easy and a pleasure. There are too few words in the English language to describe these trees. They tower above you so high that you literally lose the tops in the sky. To stand and look at one, you can probably only see about one-fifth of the girth of the tree. It’s a journey in itself just to walk around the base of a giant redwood. I could live there. My greatest joy was that the kids all ended up saying that the forest was much more spectacular than anything they thought it would be. They were thoroughly impressed. Job done. ;o)


This is a fallen redwood and if you look with a microscope you can see Kris on the right side of the stump.

There was a neat little junk shop/tourist trap alongside the road with a Gravity House in the back. We walked in at 5:00, just when the shopkeeper was about to close up. He humored us and gave us 15 minutes to check out their gravity contraption, which totally made me wacky. My mind just couldn’t get a grip on how I was supposed to stand upright while the walls were crooked… The mind is an evil and twisted thing. This stop was Tia’s idea and was a total blast.

At the end of the Avenue of Giants is a nice little scenic highway that runs right along the cliffs. It’s called Highway 1. I hate Highway 1. The 43.9 miles we drove on that God-forsaken highway took us all of three hours. I had one stroke and three heart attacks on the drive, and the kids were so quiet you could hear a gnat belch. We had to stop once to let the brakes cool off since they were smoking. Every 20 feet was a switchback or hairpin turn that was at tops a 10-mph turn. Uphill, downhill, around and around. Hurl.


Anyway, we finally made it down the highway into the KOA at Manchester Beach. We enjoyed a dinner of ribs, box taters, and peaches. Then we rambled down to the beach to take a peek at the ocean. The hills on the bluff were completely carpeted in wildflowers. The ocean was something to see. In this area it crashed on the beach instead of rolling in like it had in Seaside. And there was a seal playing just a few feet out in the waves. There was also another lighthouse, the second on our trip so far.