Berkeley Hills & The Redwood Coast
Jul 9, 2015A couple of weekends ago, we did an "urban hike" in the Berkeley Hills. The hills of Berkeley and Oakland are nice neighborhoods and in Berkeley, there is a system of walking trails throughout the neighborhood. Pictures really don't convey how cool it was, but this is definitely something I would suggest as a Berkeley activity. The houses were all eclectic, which was interesting enough on its own, and the views of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the bay in general were awesome.
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Last weekend, we decided to take a quick trip up the Redwood Coast. On the way up, we drove through "The Avenue of the Giants," which is a 31-mile road along Highway 101 that goes through tons of redwood groves. Again, it's so hard to capture how amazing things like this are with a camera. We drove a lot during our 2 day trip, and often times we were surrounded by huge redwoods that were right beside the road. I doubt we will ever see anything like it again!
One of the groves we stopped to walk around in. The plaque mentioned someone from South Carolina!
This is the tree that's behind the rock/plaque thing in the photo above, to give you some perspective on size!
We stayed in Eureka for the night, mostly because it was the only place in the area with vacancy for the weekend. July 4th in California is ridiculous. We wanted to go camping, so I started looking for sites and/or cabins weeks in advance, and everything was booked.
Eureka, I would assume, was originally a gold rush town (hence the name) and has lots of Victorian architecture. It is on the coast, so we got to take Sammie to the beach. This was definitely the highlight of the trip for her!
On our way back down to Livermore, we stopped in Fort Bragg. There is supposed to be an amazing "glass beach" there, full of colorful sea glass. I think we missed the good one and weren't willing to drive backwards, so we went to one closer to downtown. Umm... major fail. It was just a bunch of little rocks, some of which were blue or green. It was also SO crowded, especially with foreigners! Even with my limited knowledge of California, I don't know why a foreigner would waste time in Fort Bragg. There are way better things to see!
The coast was really pretty, but it was basically a not-as-good version of Big Sur. Big Sur is surreal it's so beautiful, and it feels so remote, which is one of the attractions, in my opinion. There aren't people all over the beach and camping, etc. is highly regulated. In Fort Bragg, there were tons of people camping and RVs parked all over the beach. We saw an old pickup truck doing doughnuts on the coast. What?! We also saw some trucks at the grocery store parking lot flying confederate flags. Again, what?! I'm sure all of this was unusual due to the holiday weekend, but it just seemed a little trashy overall. I know we would have always wondered what it was like, so it was worth the one night trip. The redwoods and Avenue of the Giants were amazing, seeing Sammie have fun on the beach is always worth it, and Eureka was a cute town, but I probably wouldn't recommend Fort Bragg to others.
We don't have much time left in California! We have a trip planned to Lake Tahoe, and other than that, we just plan to see more of San Francisco and the bay area. We will be headed to LA on August 8, staying for a couple of nights, and then we'll start our drive back across the country.
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