Hmmm... it seems that vacations are not that different from work. Estimates you felt confident about turn out to be much too short, everything takes twice as long as you guessed, and unexpected things always happen.

We lingered at Elk Guest House until 10 AM, and plan to come back for a weekend sometime when we can just hang out there enjoying the quiet and beauty. Driving north went rather slow, with many stops for roadcrew working, but very beautiful and uplifting. The beaches north of Ft Bragg were especially beautiful.

A bit north from there however the road cuts over the hills to rejoin 101, and is a very slow and windy one with 20-mph curves that takes forever to drive. By the time we reached the Avenue of the Giants, it was already 3 PM and our reservations in Eugene were still 6 1/2 hours away if we ignored the redwoods and drove like crazy. A little anxiety here, a little worry there, a couple of phone calls, and we managed to cancel Eugene and change our reservation to Coos Bay.

We then proceeded to take our slow sweet time in the redwoods, including a walk with the dogs down to the gravel bars of the Eel River. After that though we found we were still many hours short of Coos Bay, now in a rainstorm. It was hairy and exhausting driving as far as the Oregon border, but there fortunately the rain and fog cleared away and left us driving through a slightly misty, lavender-peach tinted sunset. No pictures of that though since we were driving bat-out-of-hell to reach Coos Bay. It was beautiful and almost worth arriving so late to have been out and about in it. By the time we reached Coos Bay though we were both exhausted and cranky and it was not a fun evening (what was left of it).

Plus, I discovered in the morning when I paid my phone bill the high desireability of putting less photos on these trip pages! So I will henceforth excercise extreme discipline and only put 4 or 5 of my favorite photos on the page of the day.