10/6: In Colusa, a small town in the middle of the valley, we decided to fill up on gas. I went into the gas station shop to ask if there was any place nearby where we could buy pancakes, but when the very fat woman behind the counter just said no and looked at me disdainfully, I decided to just pump the gas and get going.

Things rarely go according to plan. When I had inserted my creditcard into the gas pump twice and only gotten an error message as answer, I went into the small shop again to pay at the counter instead. At first, the very fat woman seemed annoyed with my handling of the gas pump. Apparently, I had chosen the wrong payment option for my type of card.

Very well, I asked if I could pay her instead. But I wasn’t sure how much this rental car of ours could carry, so I said I wanted to buy gas for $60. Right after saying that, though, I remembred that that’s what we payed the last time. So, just to be sure, I asked if I could change the ammount to $55 instead. She looked at me like I was the most annoying person in the world and said no, she had already pushed the charge button.

No matter. I went out, started pumping the gas and, believe it or not, a couple of cents after $55, the pump made a sound to tell me that the tank was full. Pretty funny, thought I and went into the shop again to ask what we should do about the extra money.

The fat woman behind the counter just looked at me, got a lok of pure hatred in her eyes and said: “Not you again!”

I barely got to explain the situation, before she opened the register and took out a five-dollar-bill. Then she turned to the next customer, as if by treating me like air, I would disappear. I was so baffled that I just walked out and returned to the car.

I still don’t understand what in my behaviour made me deserve such a reception in Colusa. I was all smiles and slightly stupid tourist. Nothing to provoke such aversion. I just have to conclude that people in Colusa are extremely rude.

10/6: So we drove east from Clearlake. With an abruptness that tickled my amateur geologist curiousity, the yellow mountains turned into a completely flat valley. Far away on the horizon, we could barely see the other mountain range through the shimmering heat. We had reached the Central Valley. This is where a big part of all the vegetables and fruits that are eaten in the United States come from. The orchards and water covered fields took turns making up our view from our car windows.

We stopped by the signs, informing us that they sold fruit. These days, our diet consisted mostly of in season Californian fruit and berries. The heat was like a wall as soon as we stepped out of the car. Staying out in the sun for a longer period of time would havr been impossible.

I guess this plateau, which probably used to be seafloor and therefore has soil that is high in calcium and other nutrients, is very fertile. But I couldn’t help feeling the heat and seeing the clear blue sky and thinking that this needs huge amounts of irrigation. Probably from aquifers that are stressed as hell. And it made me sad. Because, even though I love peaches and nectarines, I don’t think they are worth the price of depleting our groundwater for. I really need to get back to university, so that I can learn what to do about it.

The cities and towns that we drove through in the Central Valley, didn’t feel like cities at all. They were just stretches of malls and Walmarts and drive-through restaurants along the highway. We had obviously reached another part of America, not the Arcata cute, small-scale, farmer’s market California coast, but the large-scale, corporate inland. Hanna wanted to visit a Walmart, so we stopped at the one in Yoruba City. We left pretty quickly too.

10/6: Clearlake is the largest lake within the Californian borders. When we woke up in Lucerne, we walked down to a boardwalk down by the lake and had leftover fruit for breakfast. The lake didn’t seem that big. But then again, having grown up in serious glacial lake country, few places will seem lakey I guess.

Still, it was beautiful, with the surrounding golden mountains and the heat and the smell of dry grass. It looked like something Italian. Or maybe Greek. Or just Mediterranean, seeing as that’s the climate they have here. Sunny dry summers and rainy winters. We had left the green wilderness of the redwoods behind.

But as we started driving, it hit me how particularily unique this place looked like. With the yellow mountains and the odd oak sticking up here and there, it really didn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before. I take the thing about Italian back. This was obviously Californian.

Mr. P with the day’s catch of fruit: peaches, nectarines, cherries, strawberries and sweet peas.

9/6: That afternoon, after leaving Humboldt State Park behind, we decided that we would drive as far as we could before giving up for the day. The highway soon turned into a winding mountain road and the cars would line up behind us. But I simply didn’t dare speed, mountain driving is far too complicated already as it is. So, I kept the speed limit while Hanna fed me and herself with the sweet peas from Arcata.

At this very odd souvenir shop in the middle of the forest, close to nothing special, I met a dear friend.

We drove through these tiny mountain towns, only consisting of a hundred meter stretch along the highway with a couple of gas stations, some restaurants and a motel. Quite deserted. They felt very odd.

Looking at the map and the route we were planning on taking, we eventually decided to find a motel in Nice. Because it sounded nice. But, when we finally reached this tiny town, it was almost dark already and everything was closed. Feeling a bit worried, we decided to continue to the next small town.

Luckily, we had more luck in Lucerne. There, we found a small lakeside motel with a vacant double queen bed room. Sleep was sweet.

9/6: There is a road, that forks off of and runs parallell to 101, that goes straight through Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It is called Avenue of the Giants. And it doesn’t take long to understand what they mean by that name.

You drive through something like a tunnel of trees, with the canopy as an inpenetratable cover from the sun. In places, the trees are so huge and grow so densely, that you litterarily cannot see the forest for all the trees.

We were supposed to find a trail on a sideroad to the Avenue, that supposedly had the largest trees, but we got kind of lost and ended up taking a walk straight into the forest. There, we found this spring, and that, once the first bushes of undergrowth next to the road was behind us, the forest floor became quite open. So little sunlight was let through the canopies of these giant redwoods, that no plants couuld grow underneath them.

As you see, building a house out of one single piece of trunk would certainly be possible with these monsters.

Finally, we found another trail and I got to go on my last redwoods hike.

Well, the root system of the trees wasn’t that small either.

When we left the Avenue of the Giants and returned to the 101, I felt a little bit melancholic. That was the last I would see of these northern California redwoods. They are amazing organisms, and the forests are magical. Like from another world.

9/6: We had just gotten out on the 101 after a wonderful lunch in Ferndale, when we caught up to a pickup truck with a motorcycle in a trailer behind it. Hanna, who was driving, didn’t want to be behind the truck, so she drove passed it. But only a moment later, the pickup truck passed us again. It probably was a hard hit on his masculinity, that a small silver Toyota Camry with a girl behind the wheel drove faster than him.

This got Hanna into a rage. Those macho men. For a while, she wouldn’t stop talking about American men, according to her the source of all evil in the world. Wars, Las Vegas and golf courses.

Her speech kept me laughing all the way to Avenue of the Giants.

9/6: Well, Ferndale, a short drive south of Arcata, on the other hand was built in lavish Victorian style by farmers that had become rich by producing dairy for the gold hunting state of California. It really feels like a place from another time, placed in this hilly grass and forest country by mistake.

Even the public restrooms felt like something from an old movie.

I like odd and crazy and different architecture, I do, but this was almost over the top. It was fun, to walk around among these lavishly decorated houses with the extreme colour combinations, but I don’t think I would like to live there. The houses were just SO meticulously kept after, it didn’t feel livable.

But we had a delicious lunch in a small restaurant owned by this tiny, very charming man. And the Italian sandwiches he made us, my gosh, they did seriously rival the one I had at Paseo in Ballard, Seattle. I really didn’t know you could make sandwiches taste so good.

9/6: Arcata is a small university town that according to the guidebook might be one of the most progressive in the US. The politics there are uncommonly leftist (for being American). The garbage trucks run on biodiesel, the recycling gets picked up by tandem bikes and almost every road has a bike lane. It’s mostly populated by students or other young people looking to ‘expand their mind’. It’s also the center of the very productive high quality medical marijuana business of the northern California coast.

What all this boils down to is a town with a very relaxed atmosphere with streets full of interesting small stores and a central square full of odd but fascinating people. That we happened to be there on a Saturday morning just made things even more enjoyable: on Saturdays, the Arcata farmer’s market takes over the entire square.

We bought tons of strawberries and cherries and sweet peas and just didn’t want to leave.

And just a couple of blocks from the main square, these odd old houses started popping up and feeding our imaginations about their residents.

And they had palm trees in their gardens! We really were in California now.

Fairwinds Motel, where we spent the night. We could easily have spent a couple of mor nights there, though. Both Hanna and I fell completely in love with this charming town with the bikes and odd houses and second-hand stores. Wonderful!

But we had to drive on.

8/6: It really is very convenient, driving a car. Being able to decide yourself where to go and when to stop. Having grown up in Stockholm with a single mom with a license but no car and a remarried dad with a car but no license, made me feel that public transportation was freedom. I didn’t see the point with driving, it’s just bad for the environment. That’s why I didn’t get my license until two days before I turned twenty-four.

But now I see it. While traveling in a foreign country, or maybe more correctly, North America, there really isn’t any other way of transportation that is more convenient. Because, how else would we have been able to come around a turn in the road, be blinded by the setting sun and simply stop at this random northern California beach to enjoy the mist softened beauty?

After three days on the road, the driving felt completely natural too. We were just enjoying ourselves immensely, Hanna and I.

Just before dark, we arrived in Arcata and found a motel to stay at for the night. It was funished as if it hadn’t been updated since the seventies, with a lot of brown and a huge fat TV. But we slept well.