Thunder Road (part 3)

I’m playing catch-up with entries, so scroll down if you want things in chronological order – i’d especially like people to read Thunder Road part 2, as it describes one of the most interesting things that I’ve seen on this trip.

Beth dragged me out of bed kicking and screaming at the ungodly hour of 8am with the albeit justified reasoning that if we wanted to see things and get to San Francisco on time, we would have to get up earlier. She was right, of course, but I still loathe getting out of bed in the mornings, especially when it’s foggy and cold.

After driving for 30 minutes we crossed over into California, and made our way towards the Redwood National Park. Some people had advised us to visit “Trees of Mystery”, which is basically a theme park amidst the Redwoods. I sort of fancied it, until Beth pointed out that we could just go further south to the Redwood National Park and see big trees for free, which was of course a much better idea, so we did that. The previous post had massive written entries, so here you can just enjoy photos of us next to massive trees.

After the redwoods we drove further into California, deviating from route 101 briefly onto route 1 so as to stick closer to the coast. Along the way we saw signs for something incredible. Everyone knows that in America they love drive-thru food. I’d already noticed that in America you can get drive-thur Starbucks, as well as drive-thru pharmacies and drive-thru banks. Yet before our eyes was a sign for the “World Famous Drive-Thru Tree”. well we just had to go for it, $5 or otherwise. Obvsiously it was silly and not worth $5, but it ammused us for a while. Americans are especially keen on labeling things as “WORLD FAMOUS!!!!!!” when this is almost always a blatant lie. The Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree is not world-famous, but apparently Americans won’t go unless they get told that something is either world famous, or was “seen on TV”, that other favourite crowd-pulling device.

After driving through a tree we headed yet further south and looked for a motel as it was getting dark. Having learned from previous nights that the first rate you get offered at a motel is never the best rate you can get, we got $10 knocked off nothing less than  Wild West Themed Motel. I’m serious. We were given the “hotel” themed room, though personally I thought it looked more like a whore’s boudoir: