Kelly and I are on a PNW road trip! This journey was a great excuse to stop at a bunch of places we wanted to see, play games, and meet new friends. We anchored our time on the road around great conventions (like Dragonflight, PAX West, and RCCC) where we are running booths!
We loaded up the car with some PNW books and cards, camping gear, convention setup bins, and clothes (the ol' Camry was packed), and shoved off from Berkeley, California, where we moved a few months ago for Kelly's rockin' research job. We started much later in the day than planned (a time-honored road-trip tradition for my family) and headed north along Hwy 101 AKA the Redwood Highway. We went to Eureka for the night, stopping off the road along the way for our first random road-trip attraction: a giant drive-through redwood.
Not pictured: minor car side-mirror incident driving through the tree
We stayed at the historic Eureka Inn, which was lined with photos of famous people who had stayed there previously—the place felt dated in a steeped-in-history sort of way, and it certainly felt like I was a suit and a cigarette away from fitting in.
In the morning we stopped into a few shops in the downtown area, and had our first PNW sighting at Humboldt Mercantile, a gift shop that carries our books:
We went north from Eureka into the Redwoods National Hark. We stopped through the Thomas H Kuchel visitor center and decided on the Prairie Creek area for our hike thanks to Ranger Steve. We took the Karl Knapp to Foothill Trail Loop and it was a gorgeous walk through towering redwoods. A creek babbles along for the first bit of the hike. Overall the trail was a perfect setting—not too busy, even on a Friday in peak summer, and pretty flat and lovely to stretch our legs after our drive the day before.
We ended up at one of the oldest redwoods in the park, Big Tree, a name apt for how humongous it was. This was a very rewarding hike, three miles spent face-to-trunk with old growth forest—I highly recommend it.
After our hike, we drove to Crescent City, a coastal town at the northernmost bit of California. We got lunch at Seaquake Brewing and stopped into a game store, The Kobold’s Lair, where we met a new friend: JD, the store owner. He picked up some books and cards for the shop (thank you, JD!).
Crescent City had beautiful, sweeping views of the Pacific and I wish we could have stayed there longer, but we were headed further north for the night. Up next, Oregon!