Driving with the Giants
This part of the journey included a stop at the “drive-thru” tree where you can actually drive your car down this road that goes right through the center of a living Redwood tree at a cost of $5 per vehicle. The Corvette, being kind of wide at the ends of the side view mirrors just barely fit through with maybe an inch clearance on each side.
Drive Thru Tree
Another stop of the day was the town of Scotia, CA right off US-101. This place is a complete town owned and maintained by the Pacific Lumber Company (PALCO) where over 1000 people reside. While previously a fairly common thing in many different heavy industries, apparently, this is the only remaining company owned town in the USA. The plan here was to tour the PALCO state of the art lumber mill via a self-guided (and free!) tour. However, it turns out that they have recently decided to suspend their tour operations as they have been under political pressure from environmentalist types and the company has decided that such tours were not in their best interests any longer. Damn tree huggers. California really is the left coast.
In any case, our next planned stop of the day was in Benbow, CA. What is significant about Benbow you might ask? Nothing, except that it was the geographic halfway point of our trip. At Benbow, there was 3750 track miles behind and ahead of us! We celebrated the milestone with a short visit to the historic Benbow Inn and some reflection on the fact that our trip is halfway over already. Maybe we should have stuck with the original 8 week and 12,500 mile trip!?
Benbow Inn - Halfway Point!
One unexpected thing we encountered along the way today, on an older 2-lane section of US-101, was a huge camp for the California firefighters fighting one of the wildfires. Apparently, there are these areas where they take over some farm fields and setup camp(s) with people, equipment and supplies. We haven’t directly seen any of the fires in California, but we did see a smaller one while travelling across part of Oregon and on occasion can see and/or smell the smoke from them.
CALFIRE Camp on US-101
Later in the day, as we made our way farther south on US-101, we got into the wine country of the Sonoma Valley and visited a small handful of wineries to do some tasting of the local produce.
Sonoma Valley
Wine Tour Friends Phil and Marianna
Corvette at a Vineyard
We ended the day today just short of San Francisco in Rohnert Park, CA. Tomorrow we head out along US-1 across the Golden Gate Bridge into the city….
