From the Bay, we started heading north with the ultimate intention to spend a week or so with Kurt & Sarah, two wonderful people who don’t mind traveling hobos stopping by either their place in the Bay Area, or in Oregon! We started our trip up by driving up the 101 and stopping briefly in Eureka for a highly recommended gelato. The OKish ice cream notwithstanding (sorry Neetu…), Eureka also is the home of fancy chocolatier Dick Taylor – while Rachel seems unimpressed below, the chocolate is actually fantastic!

The first night was spent in Sue-Meg State Park, another one of the amazing California parks we had never heard of, but were incredibly glad to have found on the roadtrip!

Next morning, on the road again – this time to Redwoods State/National/Earthwide(?) Park. The history lesson about the mess that informed the Redwoods’ Park official status as both a state and national park was pretty interesting, but seeing these monstrous trees up close makes you forget all of that and just marvel at nature’s insane megastructures

Finally, we make our way to Coos Bay for our first stop outside of California. No trip to meet with Dr Schab and Dr Banducci would be complete without an escape room, which was thoroughly crushed – turns out bigfoot is in cryo storage somewhere in southwest Oregon, who knew? There’s lots more to mention (forced berry picking labor, crabbing, etc.) but maybe Rachel can fill those parts out later…