We made an overnight stop in Davis to visit long-time friends Dave and Nancy, who love to travel also, so it was a lot of fun to share stories.
Our next stop was an Airbnb in Arcata on the California coast. We wanted to stay where the air was clear and the temperature moderate for a little while longer.
This is the house where our apartment was located, it is the structure on the left in the rear. We thought it might be noisy, as Hwy 101 was just across the street, but it was amazingly quiet. Thank goodness.
For those who are not aware, Arcata is home to Humboldt State University, so has a lively collection of cafes, coffee shops, and galleries. We strolled through the Saturday Farmers Market held on the grassy plaza downtown. The guy above was peddling around on his home-made tricycle. Not sure the reason?!
Lots of local produce available, I particularly liked the multi-colored cauliflower and peppers.
I just gotta get some rest!
I did say it was a University town didn't I?
Just a lovely dog.
We also paid a visit to neighboring Eureka and it's waterfront.
We were surprised to find so many murals in Eureka, quite amazing. Very well executed and we did not see any intrusive graffiti.
The bottom one of these two is quite large. I have another set of photos that I will eventually merge into a better panorama.
This was the plaque next to the large panorama above.
Eureka is also home to the Morris Graves Museum of Art. The building used to be the city library before the city built a new building downtown. This original building was to be torn down, but the local arts council caught wind of this and approached the city council. Bottom line, the city agreed to sell the building to the arts council for $1.00, providing they raised the money to refurbish it.
$1.5M was raised and a splendid building got a new life.
This is a view looking down onto the tiled floor of the museum foyer, apparently each tile was placed individually.
Just south of Eureka is the Humboldt Bay Natural Wildlife Refuge, so we decided to take a short walk there. This area was once a 9,000 acre salt marsh until the white settlers decided it was just useless wetland and would be better used if it was diked and drained to provide grazing for cattle. It wasn't known at the time just how important these tidal marshes were to the local ecology.
Cute little devil.
There were quite a few of these Herons visible in the marsh. This would be a great place to revisit and hike a longer trail. Stopping by the site office we saw there was a daily log for people to note what kind of wildlife they had seen on the day they visited. It was a long list.
We headed back to the Rogue Valley on Monday August 24, and made our first stop to say hello to our former neighbors, Jack and Carol. This brought us full circle to where we started out in mid- March, returning many thousands of miles and photographs later.
Unfortunately, not the beautiful clean air that we associate with this part of the world. It has been a pretty brutal summer here while we were travelling. Very hot days and terrible forest fires in the Northwest.
Next stop, house hunting. Stay tuned.
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