Category Archives: Uncategorized

Oregon Forest Mountains

Oregon Coastline Vista View

Jeff above the Clouds

Sea Lions on the Shore

Orgeon Forest Shoreline

We decided we must be getting spoiled with the great views, because now as we approach each vista viewpoint we have to make a decision as to whether the view is “good enough” to stop and take pictures or not….and at this point, the bar is getting pretty darn high. There is just so much to see!

In the planning of the trip, we purposely setup the west coast travelling to be shorter distances because we knew the driving would be slower and therefore the days too long if we didn’t cut back on the miles to around 200 miles or less. Distance and time of driving for the days has been good, but we have been stopping to see so many different parks, beaches, hiking trails, towns, etc. that we are both feeling a bit fried today. Fortunately, today was a particularly short day of driving (about 120 miles) and we were able to get into Fortuna, California relatively early and call it day at that point.

Even though the day was short, we did manage to see quite a bit of stuff today with the primary goal of getting to see some of the various areas of the state and national Redwood Forests. Some of the areas of these parks are old growth trees – some in excess of 1000 years old and other areas are re-grown forests that are only 30 to 50 years old. It’s actually not trivial to tell the differences because the Redwood trees grow so fast; something like 5 to 10 feet per year. The only noticeable difference in the newly grown forests is that lack of the occasionally truly massive trees. The really old ones can be as much as 20 to 30 feet in diameter and in excess of 250 feet tall.

Really Big Tree

Really Really Big Tree

Really Really Big Squirrel

Really Big Paul Bunyon

Regular Sized Elk along Roadside

Based on our experiences of trying to do too much over the last few days via all the impromptu stops, we decided over dinner tonight for tomorrow and likely beyond we are reverting back to our original modus operandi of 3 or 4 planned stops each day and consciously driving past basically everything else. There is just too much to see for one trip!

Tomorrow we head south from Fortuna, CA more inland to Sonoma Valley just north of San Francisco.

While we are having a great time on our cross country road trip, we thought we would note the less glamorous side of things here too. First, is keeping the windshield reasonably free of bug splats…..which depending on conditions is something we do between two and three times a day…meaning once every 100 to 200 miles. The faster we drive, the more this seems to be needed.

Of course, there is also adding fuel to the car. We have been doing this approximately once at the end of every day of driving, although on some of the longer days in more remote areas we have topped off the tank here and there just to make sure we don’t run into any desperate situations. We have been averaging between 400 and 500 miles per fill-up.

Incidentally, the Corvette has averaged 28.2 MPG so far on the trip. This includes all local stop and go driving, quite a bit of higher speed driving across the open areas, mountain hill climbs, etc. If we stuck to just to the highways with the cruise control set to 75 MPH, we would be getting more like 32 or 33 MPG…..but we avoid cruise control and the interstates where possible/practical because that would take all the fun out of the driving!

Finally, there is the washing of the car….which is mainly for getting rid of the bug splats on the front fascia and cleaning off all the dirt that collects on the back of the car when driving on wet roads in particular. The car has been washed on an average of once every other day or so which works out to maybe once every 600 to 800 miles.